A Great Mistake!

by Anna Campbell

Wonderful Aussie author Sarah Mayberry  has ventured into self-publishing with HER BEST WORST MISTAKE, a sequel to her 2010 Blaze HOT ISLAND NIGHTS. I loved HOT ISLAND NIGHTS so much that I gave it a glowing review here on the Romance Dishes in September 2010.

In that book, repressed English girl Elizabeth Morgan discovers her father isn’t dead as she believed but is very much alive and living on Phillip Island outside Melbourne. This turns her life upside down. She ditches her polite, decorous life and her polite, decorous fiancé and takes off for the other side of the world where she finds love with gorgeous surfer (and tortured hero) Nate.

HER BEST WORST MISTAKE tells the fiance’s love story and is mostly based back in chilly London during the winter that Elizabeth is in Australia soaking up romance and sunshine. Sarah writes beautiful friends into lovers stories. This one is a twist on that – it’s an enemies into lovers story and it’s brilliant.

Martin St. Clair is one of my favorite sorts of heroes, the stuffed shirt who discovers his inner fire when he falls in love with the last person he ever saw himself wanting. Laura Lee Guhrke does a great line in this sort of hero too and it’s always delicious watching their pompous ways melt away to reveal the passionate man beneath the buttoned-down facade. What’s lovely about this style of hero is that he starts as a man of principle and he remains that in essence; he just discovers his inner tiger along the way!

Elizabeth’s best friend Violet Sutcliffe and Martin have always hated one another. She thinks he’s an old-before-his time stick-in-the-mud. He thinks she’s a flighty, promiscuous flake who’s been born with a silver spoon in her mouth and has had life far too easy. But when Elizabeth runs away, Violet and Martin are thrown together and it rapidly becomes clear that all that sniping and hatred was outward manifestation of frustrated attraction. The first kiss in this book is a doozy – all that repressed longing comes out and how!

The dialogue crackles – I love the way Martin and Violet snark at each other, neither giving an inch. And all the time while they’re fighting so hard to keep the other one at a distance, they’re falling helplessly and completely in love. It’s also wonderful to watch how both Martin and Violet reluctantly and sometimes inadvertently reveal their vulnerable souls. This book could be retitled Pride and Preconceptions! And man, are the love scenes hawt! Martin and Violet can’t keep their hands off each other. No matter how unacceptable they both find this heady attraction, neither can resist the sizzling chemistry between them.

HER BEST WORST MISTAKE is funny, wildly sexy, surprisingly moving as emotional truths emerge when a relationship that’s meant to be purely physical develops in directions neither Martin nor Violet imagined, and beautifully wise. One of the best books I’ve read in ages and I highly recommend it. You can buy it on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Her-Best-Worst-Mistake-ebook/dp/B00807FKPA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1338160417&sr=8-1 For other stockists, check out Sarah’s website: http://www.sarahmayberry.com/herbestworstmistake

So are you a fan of enemies into lovers books? What about books featuring repressed heroes who break out into a whole new world when they fall in love? Any favorites in either style?

Good Girls Gone Bad!

by Anna Campbell

Hmm, perhaps I should start this review by admitting I've gone to Blazes.

Harlequin Blazes, that is!

I'm a fairly recent convert to this particular line in Harlequin. I read a few of the first ones out - hey, it's a hot, sensual line of romances, of COURSE I tried them! But sadly, they weren't really me.

Then a couple of years ago, I met wonderful Bandita Tawny Weber and fell in love with her writing. Then a good friend (Sharon Archer, an Aussie Medical Romance writer who's great!) recommended Sarah Mayberry's books to me. Add Kathleen O'Reilly to that mix (my Second Helping review of her wonderful LONG SUMMER NIGHTS is here) and you've basically got three of my favorite contemporary authors. And they all write for Blaze!

Recentlly I handed a book in and as my reward, I pulled Tawny and Sarah's latest off the tottering TBR pile. And found to my surprise that the two books shared a common theme, one I always love in a romance - the nerdy Plain Jane who discovers her inner siren under the influence of the passion she finds in the arms of a gorgeous stranger. Who almost always ends up being more than the sexy drifter he appears on the outside.

I think there's a couple of themes most of us find irresistible. One is the bad guy who falls for the 'good' girl and in the process finds redemption (think of all those Regency rake heroes!). Another is the 'good' girl who casts away her inhibitions and finds a completely new side of herself when she surrenders to the wild boy.

One of the lovely parts of the 'good girl' romance is that often it becomes clear that the guy she falls in loves with learns to love her in all her nerdy glory too. There's a deeper connection than suddenly wearing a skimpy bikini or drinking too much and dancing on the tables would immediately suggest.

In HOT ISLAND NIGHTS, Sarah Mayberry's latest, repressed upper-crust English girl (she's not a maiden but she may as well be!) Elizabeth Morgan suddenly discovers the existence of a father she never knew she had and she abandons her restricted life in search of him. This means cancelling her wedding to her boring fiance and flying across the world to Phillip Island in Australia. Actually I had to giggle here! HOT ISLAND NIGHTS conjures up the image of the Barrier Reef or somewhere equally tropical. Phillip Island is south of Melbourne and is so cold, penguins nest there!

However, in spite of this adverse weather report, Elizabeth's island nights become very hot indeed when she starts a reluctant flirtation with handsome drifter Nathan Jones while she waits for her father to get back from preparing for a major yacht race in Sydney. It's not long before she sees beneath Nathan's sham facade of casual, easygoing layabout who is interested in nothing but surfing. And then the real trouble starts!

This book lures you in with its tale of a woman learning to let herself go and you're enmeshed by the time it delves the depths of human emotion. I found myself laughing a few times but at other times, I found myself with tears in my eyes, especially as we discover more about Nathan's past. I'm in awe that Sarah manages to pack such a profound variety of human experience into 215 pages. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

Tawny's book RIDING THE WAVES also starts with our nerdy heroine deciding to take a holiday, this time to Mexico. Where you guessed it, she meets a guy she assumes is a toyboy interested purely in sex and surfing (surfing seems to be the new black!). Believing that what happens in Mexico stays in Mexico, she embarks on a wild fling that she intends to leave behind when she returns to her real life.

But what happens when her fling follows her home and turns out to be her new colleague?

As you can imagine, sparks fly!

Drucilla is an astronomer (great career for a romance heroine!) who has submerged her sexuality in her career. Her relationships with nerdy fellow scientists never go anywhere and the only place she sees stars is when she's looking through a telescope. All that changes when she meets the gorgeous Alex in Mexico. Little does she know the man she's selected for an unforgettable week of passion followed by a final good-bye is A.A. Maddow, hotshot darling of the astronomy set.

When Alex and Dru meet up again in her lab, he's eager to pursue the relationship. He's glimpsed more than just physical passion in his interactions with Dru. So has she and she's terrified out of her brain! So we're set up for a delicious push-pull between these two smart-mouthed characters. In the process, both Alex and Dru will discover they each have much more to offer than they've ever believed possible.

Like Sarah's, Tawny's books have a surface glitter of wit and humor and sexy fun, but they deal with questions deeply important to all of us. How can we be our best? Can we let go of the past to trust love? How much fun can we have in bed? Yeah, I know, but honestly, they're Blazes after all!

Again, RIDING THE WAVES is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

So do you have a favorite good girl gone bad romance? Is it a theme you enjoy?