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Review: If You Were Mine by Bella Andre

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If You Were Mine (The Sullivans, #5)If You Were Mine by Bella Andre

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher for an honest review at Romancing Rakes For The Love Of Romance.

Bella Andre continues her Sullivans series with book number five, IF YOU WERE MINE, bringing us the story of Zach Sullivan and Heather Linsey. Zach is the last person who should have been saddled with a rambunctious little puppy, however temporarily, but he couldn’t turn down his brother Gabe, or Gabe’s fianceé’s little girl. But when his good friend Agnes recommends Heather as the perfect dog trainer, Zach’s interest in Heather ensures that he’ll make all the time she needs to help him make Cuddles behave.

Growing up with a father who cheated and a mother who allowed it has made Heather bitter about men and their lack of fidelity, and just because Zach Sullivan is ridiculously handsome doesn’t mean she’ll let down her guard so he can break her heart. But Zach is used to women falling all over him, and sees Heather’s initial rejection as a challenge he is more than willing to accept, even though he already knows he can never offer her more than sex. Amazing, mind-blowing sex, to be sure, but nothing more.

When Heather’s mistrust meets Zach’s fear of commitment, the result is a story where the hero and heroine spend most of their time doing everything they can to work against their own happiness together. And that is the main reason why I did not love this book as much as the others before or after it. Every time it looked like Zach and Heather were making progress in realizing that what they had was something to treasure and nurture, one of them would backslide into their negative presuppositions about love and relationships and push the other one away again. I wanted to smack Heather more than once when she refused to even consider that Zach was a better man than her father, believing that making herself emotionally vulnerable was being stupid in a way she assumed her mother had been. But Zach was just as infuriating with his insistence that he was somehow doomed to follow in his late father’s footsteps in the worst possible way, with no reason to doubt what I considered to be an incredibly irrational belief.

The best parts of IF YOU WERE MINE were when we got to see Zach and Heather allowing themselves to be happy with each other both in and out of the bedroom. The dog training scenes were also fun, as well as any scene involving the extended Sullivan family, and I did enjoy the book when I wasn’t wanting to throw things at the hero and heroine. By the end of the story, it was a relief to see both Zach and Heather get set straight on what was true and real, and figure out that they belonged together for good. It may not have been my favorite in the series, but IF YOU WERE MINE is definitely worth reading for anyone who loves Bella Andre’s Sullivan family.

Favorite Quote:

He was halfway across the living room when he turned and said, “If it weren’t for the puppy of mass destruction over there, I’d invite you to join me.”                                                   Ah, there was the man she could so much more easily fight her attraction to.                    “If it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t be here.”

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Review: Kissing Under the Mistletoe by Bella Andre

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Kissing Under The Mistletoe (The Sullivans, #10)

This review originally appeared at Romancing Rakes For the Love of Romance

Review: Kissing Under the Mistletoe by Bella Andre

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher for an honest review at RomancingRakes4TheLuvOfRomance.blogspot.com.

Rating: ~3 hearts: I liked it

Review:

If you’re a fan of Bella Andre’s incredibly successful Sullivans series as I am, you’ll already know about Jack and Mary Sullivan, and how Mary was left alone to raise their six sons and two daughters after Jack died much too young from a brain aneurysm. In the first 8 books of the series, we got to see each of the Sullivan siblings find their one true love. Now in “Kissing Under The Mistletoe” we finally get to see how Jack and Mary met and fell in love so many years before, along with a glimpse of how wonderful being together was in their first year of marriage.

Jack Sullivan is a dedicated and brilliant electrical engineer who along with his two good friends and co-workers, has created a new portable electronic device that he believes will be a top seller for his San Francisco company. But unless he can find a way in the next 24 hours to show that the Pocket Planner has some kind of sex appeal, his boss won’t even consider trying to sell any. A lesser man would be daunted by such a task, but Jack Sullivan refuses to give up. When he and his co-workers head out to Union Square in search of a place to sit and brainstorm, that’s when Jack has the most tremendous stroke of luck. For that’s when he finds both the solution to his marketing problem and the love of his life.

Mary Ferrer is a world famous fashion model who just happens to be in Union Square that evening for the final photo shoot in her long and successful career. She’s decided to retire after tonight because although she doesn’t regret having become a model, the day-to-day life just isn’t enjoyable for her any longer, and she’d like the chance to do more than just pose for pictures. Mary feels so completely alone since she left her family behind in their small Italian village and her mother disowned her as a result of that decision. She’s tried relationships within the fashion industry, but the last one ended up leaving her even more disillusioned about men and love than before. Yet when she sees the tall and handsome Jack Sullivan staring at her from the street, Mary can’t help but stare back in return, and it’s then that she decides to take one more chance at happiness and perhaps even love.

“Kissing Under the Mistletoe” does a great job in showing exactly why Jack and Mary were so perfectly matched from the start and provides all the back story about how each of them had gotten to that moment in Union Square when fate brought them together. I loved seeing how Mary had experienced a full and exciting life completely separate from her current identity as the quiet loving matriarch of the Sullivan family, and how finding Jack wasn’t an ending for her but a beginning to a whole new life that she’d already wanted before she’d ever met him. We’d seen through the previous books how much her children are like her, but now we get that same type of recognition for their late father, as Jack comes fully to life in this story and shows us just how much he loves Mary by both his words and actions.

The only thing I didn’t fully enjoy about “Kissing Under the Mistletoe” was how the epilogue detailing the first year of their marriage was more like a series of snapshots than an actual continuation of the complete story. Normally I’m a big fan of epilogues, but in this instance I found the change in writing style to be somewhat jarring by comparison, and I almost would have rather not had it there at all.

In any case, I am still happy to have read the story of the Sullivan parents, and am looking forward to the continuing stories of the Sullivan cousins now that all of Jack and Mary’s children have been paired up and married off. Bella Andre never fails to make me care about her characters and “Kissing Under the Mistletoe” is no exception. It’s a lovely romance, perfect for the holiday season.

Favorite Quote:

“Next time I invite you in,” she said with a small smile as she gave him his coat and walked him to the front door, “I’ll let you drink your coffee.”
He was standing on her front step when he said, “Next time you invite me in, I’m going to make love to you.”

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Review: Everything For Us by M. Leighton

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Everything For Us (The Bad Boys, #3)

This review originally appeared at Seductive Musings

Review: Everything For Us by M. Leighton

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher for an honest review at SeductiveMusings.blogspot.com.

Everything For Us is the conclusion to the Bad Boys trilogy and is in no way a stand-alone book. This review contains significant spoilers for Down to You and Up to Me, the first two books in the series.

Everything For Us picks up not long after the rescue of Marissa, Olivia’s cousin who had been kidnapped in a case of mistaken identity in the previous book, Up to Me. After all the suspense, violence and exposed secrets in the first two Bad Boys books, this conclusion to the story of Cash and Nash Davenport is almost sedate by comparison.

Identity is an ongoing theme in this trilogy, where we were first led to believe that Cash and Nash were twin brothers, half-orphaned by the Russian mobsters who had killed their mother and gotten their father sent to prison for her murder. When we found out that Cash was posing as his dead brother Nash, it was obviously quite a surprise. But then we found out later on that Nash was actually still alive, and ready for revenge against everyone who had ruined his life and destroyed his family. Meanwhile Olivia had fallen for Cash at the same time he was still also posing as Nash, and her cousin Marissa was dating the person she thought was Nash when it was really Cash.

It really isn’t as confusing as it sounds when you try to explain it, but suffice it to say that in this third book, all the identity switching becomes the linchpin for what happens between Marissa and Nash, and how the threat from the Russian mobsters is eventually neutralized once and for all.

Marissa’s problem has always been that she was the rich snooty one who had been groomed by her equally rich and snooty father to think only of what was best for her family’s financial and political aspirations. She treated everyone she considered her inferior with thinly veiled contempt, including her cousin Olivia, with thinly veiled contempt. What Marissa didn’t realize is that the person she thought was Nash was dating her solely as cover so that nobody would suspect he was actually someone else.

Nash has returned to help rescue Marissa and reclaim the life his brother had been living for him over the past seven years. What he didn’t anticipate was that the part of that life he ended up wanting to claim most was Marissa herself. But Nash still has one big secret left unrevealed, one that has the power to end a relationship with Marissa once she knows the full truth.

Although Everything For Us is a satisfying conclusion to the complicated plot involving the Davenport brothers and the Russian mob, it just didn’t have the same driving force behind it for me as much as the previous books in the trilogy. After all the twists and turns that came before it, this conclusion to the story was almost anticlimactic by comparison. It’s as if the first two were the crazy rollercoaster ride and the third was the slow straight glide down to the end of the line. There is a lot of interesting character development for both Marissa and Nash, and their intimate scenes together are smoking hot and full of emotional depth. But the sense of danger was gone, and that made this book just an okay read for me.

Ratings:

Overall: 3
Sensuality level: 3

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