by Anna CampbellWonderful 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?
