Cora Kelly is trying to find some closure in her life. She wants to know more about her birth mother and thinks that working at the boarding school her mother runs. But Aiyana Turner wasn't the one to hire Cora, instead, it was one of her 8 (!) adoptive sons, Elijah. A man who Cora is desperately attracted to.
Eli has some past issues of his own. He might have been adopted by Aiyana but the beginning of his life wasn't exactly tea and roses. We don't actually get a full description of what his life was like which was sort of disappointing. There are glimpses of his current relationship with his birth mother but no resolution.
This is a wonderful Novak story but suffers from a few things -- this is a world building story so we don't get as much time with the main characters, we get to see a lot of the physical relationship with Cora and Eli (why are so many authors into sex in public places right now? Is this the new thing in romance novels?) but not as much of the emotional, there is a nice use of condoms in the beginning and some discussion of alternate means of birth control but no discussion of STIs as if condoms were only used as a mean to prevent pregnancy but nothing else.
This isn't one of Novak's super-emotional stories that rips your hearts and guts out but I still think regular readers will enjoy.
Three stars
This book comes out March 21
Followed by
No One But You
But nothing seems to go right. A big storm moves in, her husband is there with the ex-best-friend he cheated on Cass with, and she seems to have conjured a real ghost. Then, one of the three siblings who hired her to make their new hotel a success is found dead. Why was he up in the cupola? And how much can Cass and her friends do while trapped in the hotel by the snowstorm?
