Hurts to Love You

February 5, 2018
The only thing more romantic than a wedding is the long-awaited consummation of love between two favorite characters in a series, and the enjoyable third installment to Rai’s Forbidden Hearts contemporary series serves up both. When the formerly feuding Kane and Chandler clans reunite for a luxurious wedding between Livvy Kane and Nicholas Chandler, Eve, the youngest Chandler sibling, faces several days in the same place as her longtime crush, tattoo artist Gabe Hunter. Little does she know that he’s been secretly lusting after her for years. But as the adopted son of the Kane family’s hired help, Gabe has never felt worthy of the heiress. It’s fun to watch timid Eve come out of her shell and risk exposing her true feelings in the days leading up to the wedding. True to Rai’s style, family secrets and surprises add complexity to this strong story about how wealth and privilege can do as much to destroy happiness as to facilitate it. Agent: Steven Axelrod, Axelrod Agency.

Lucy Rivers and Jeremy York narrate the final installment of a soapy family saga. Eve Chandler has always been seen as a good girl, but she longs to break free of that image. Gabe Hunter has a collection of secrets he hides behind a cheerful attitude and a carefree smile. Rivers and York excel at portraying the uncertainty of Eve and Gabe when they're confronted with the possibility of turning long-held crushes into romance. As they discover, that uncertainty can sometimes manifest itself in regrettable ways. The narrators are less successful at depicting the story's secondary characters. York has a tendency to make the female characters sound shrill, while Rivers struggles to vary her range enough to create substantial differences in the male characters. K.M.P. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

March 1, 2018
A playboy tattoo artist and a beautiful heiress help one another look beneath the labels to find true love.The third and final installment of Rai's (Wrong to Need You, 2017, etc.) Forbidden Hearts series focuses on Evangeline Chandler, a sheltered heiress with "a princess problem" who yearns to escape the shadow of her family's dynasty and forge her own path as an entrepreneur. Conducting market research by working in disguise as an on-demand private driver has the added benefit of putting Eve in regular proximity to her hard-partying crush, Gabriel Hunter. Gabe is attracted to Eve, but as the tattoo studio-owning son of the Chandlers' housekeeper, he doesn't think he has a chance. When a scheduling mishap puts them together, alone, in the days before a big family wedding, Eve and Gabe get the mental and physical space they need to work on their issues and get to know each other. While their sexual attraction generates heat, their emotions drive the romance. In particular, Eve must come to terms with the impact of her father's emotional abuse. And there's a big secret buried beneath Gabe's public image as a hard-partying playboy. Eve learns Gabe is "a three-dimensional human. Not a perfect flawless cutout she could impose a crush on," and he learns the same about her, making each more, not less, irresistible. Since both protagonists' character arcs involve family sagas that have unfurled over the prior two books in the series, Rai has to walk the line between giving too much and too little backstory. Sometimes the romance plot, sexy as it is, suffers.A heartfelt, satisfying conclusion to the saga of the Kanes and Chandlers, with a sweet, if slightly shortchanged, romance.

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