I read Maisey Yates because I know exactly what I’m going to get. I don’t mean this in a predictable, comfort-read kind of way. Yates is NOT a comforting read; she is an angst-queen. I read her because I like her ethos: it’s as close to sexy inspie minus-God-talk as you’re going to get in contemporary romance. In Yates’s romances, encounters are meaningful; the past, redeemable; sex, mystical and earthy all at once; and, love, something huge, frightening, wonderful, and as much to be run away from as to run towards. These themes are reiterated in every romance, but they never get old and are expressed with urgency as the basis of self-fulfillment and a happy marriage. Most importantly, for Yates, as for my long-lamented absent romance-writing friend, Ros Clarke, the body knows before the mind and heart can come into its orbit.
In Yates’s seventh Gold Valley romance, she tackles a heroine with a daunting backstory. Vanessa Logan (Olivia’s sister, heroine of Yates’s first Gold Valley romance, Smooth-Talking Cowboy) returns to home-town Gold Valley because it is “the last refuge for her demons, and the final locked door in her life … her origin story. And everyone needed to revisit an origin story. She’d gone out on her own, failed, hit rock bottom and healed. But she had healed away, not at the site of her first fall from grace.” Teen-age Vanessa had shamed her family by drinking, carousing, and indulging in promiscuity. Running away to LA, she became an addict to drugs and alcohol. Now, she’s back to confront her family and teach art therapy to the hero’s, Jacob Dalton’s, brother’s therapy ranch for troubled boys.
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My dear friend 
I kept Felicia Grossman’s Appetites and Vices close to my reader heart for weeks, patiently awaiting release day. I was excited about a new romance writer with an unusual premise. Sadly, work kept me at a panting pace and my reading was sporadic at best, a chapter here, a nodding over a page in bed there. My interest, maybe because of the pace at which I read, was equally uneven, enthralled at times, sluggish at others. More of that later.
Honestly, folks, I’m scared to take a reading-breath, I’ve had SUCH a run of great books since New Year’s and Holiday’s Three Little Words gets on that list too. Not that I’m complaining, but as an introvert and pessimist, I do wonder: when will the reading ball drop? 
Just when I think I’m done with the HP, Michelle Smart comes along with The Sicilian’s Bought Cinderella and hauls me back in … 
Man, this series: each book is better than the one before. It’s rare that I’ll start a review with a ringing endorsement: I like to keep my reviewing cards up my sleeve. BUT I’m groggy from lack of sleep, thanks to an early work morning after I stayed up reading Loren’s The One You Fight For (Ones Who Got Away #3), weeping into my pillow (and I’m not a narrative cryer: I was indifferent to Bambi), and then staying up even later, thinking about how Loren pulled off the unlikely – again. And this premise is even more unlikely than the first two series books. How do you make a romance possible, believable, and engaging when it’s between the woman who lost her sister in a school shooting, where she might’ve been killed as well and the man whose brother did the killing? There are several sensitive, interesting things Loren did and they have to do with how she layered and built her characters, how she managed to infuse her novel with heartbreak, humour, and tenderness. 
Ah, Hoyt, who’s written some of my favourite historical romances, The Leopard Prince and Duke Of Sin. Therefore, a new Hoyt series is always welcome and I happily plunged into Not the Duke’s Darling as my first 2019 romance-read. Though it didn’t reach the heights of my favourites, difficult to do given how much I love them, it was satisfying. In particular, the storylines and premise it sets up make me eager for the books-to-come. 
Jennifer Hayward’s Married For His One-Night Heir started out very conventionally HP-ish, but that’s not how it developped, or where it ended up, though I assure you the HEA is front and centre. I like to pepper my reading with the occasional HP, especially when it’s written by a writer as adept as Hayward (gosh, I do miss Morgan’s HPs). And this appeared, at first, to give me the same-same. Warning to those who don’t like’em: heroine Giovanna “Gia” Castiglione, aka De Luca, has been hiding out in the Bahamas with her three-year-old son Leo after her mobster husband Franco was killed in Las Vegas. Leo, however, is not Franco’s son, but the hero’s, Santo Di Fiore’s. When Santo and Gia reunite at a party given by Gia’s boss, Delilah Rothschild, it isn’t long before Santo figures out that Leo is his son, the result of one passionate night with Gia. The morning after that night, despite Santo’s pleas to defy her mobster father and stay with him, Gia left, scared for Santo, scared for herself, and in thrall to her dangerous, powerful father. 
When I started reading Yates’s upteenth Copper Ridge novel, Want Me, Cowboy, I thought of abandoning it because it was too much like Helm’s A True Cowboy Christmas. In both cases, hero and heroine have known each other for years and SUDDENLY the hero decides he wants to be married and SUDDENLY notices the heroine’s appropriateness for the starring role of wife and mother in his soon-to-be neatly arranged life. The heroes think everything will be emotionally tidy, calm, organized: he and the heroine will cohabit, get along like affectionate roommates with sex and segue into being calm, adult, responsible parents. Bwahahahaha … “famous last words.” A great premise, a great trope, but did I really want to read another one? Turns out I did and I would recommend you do too. Review over. They’re both good and worth reading. 
I loved reading Thomas’s The Hollow Of Fear, but I was more-than-happy to sink into a thorough romance-romance, emotional, sexy, with a clear line to the HEA, littered with dark little moments. Though the day-job continues to be an albatross, I took a lot of time in my evenings to finish Kelly’s Just This Once, book three in The Wedding Date series. Like the others, Just This Once opens with the hero at the previous book’s hero and heroine’s wedding; it concludes with his own. A premise that’s a tad twee, but I forgive because the novels often win me over. In Just This Once, hotel-owning-rich-boy hero, Sean Wyse of the Chicago Hotel Wyse chain, is best-manning his guy best friend’s wedding, Max Brandt’s. His side-kick and ever wedding date is the friend of his heart and youth, Max’s younger sister, Molly. Sean and Molly’s friendship is immature, but kind of fun. He teases, she torments; they pretty much behave like two teens who secretly harbor crushes and take them out in silly pranks. Everyone in their friendship circle, the past and future heroes and heroines of Kelly’s series, look upon their shenanigans with affection and amusement. The silliness being given a critical nod, I liked how Kelly also built in true camaraderie, compatibility, and affection into the group’s relationships and a lovely tenderness between Sean and Molly, despite the occasional sophomoric behaviour.