Too
Hot to Handle
The Boys of Summer# 2
The Boys of Summer# 2
By: Katie Rose
Releasing January 27th, 2015
Loveswept
Katie Rose’s Boys of Summer series
returns for a delicious double-header—with the story of total opposites who are
drawn to each other like moths to a flame.
Nikki
Case is no fan of baseball. Her ex gambled away a fortune on the sport, and now
her PR firm has tasked her with cleaning up the league’s most notorious bad
boys. The New Jersey Sonics are known for wild womanizing and booze-fueled
brawls, so Nikki expects the worst. Her first stop in the battle to win hearts
and minds is star hitter Jake Baldwin—a legendary ladies man so smokin’ he
threatens to melt her tough-girl armor.
Although
his teammates prank her without mercy, Jake admires the way Nikki gives as good
as she gets. She may be the queen of frost, but there’s kindling beneath those
sultry curves—and he’s just the man to ignite it. But when a PR nightmare lands
the Sonics in headlines across the country, Nikki is ready to walk. Only then
does Jake realize how important she is to the Sonics’ success—and that winning
the love of a good woman is no game.
Too Hot to Handle
Boys of Summer Series
Amazon | B&N | iTunes | Kobo
This book took me a
chapter or two to really get into it. However, once I did, I enjoyed the story.
I liked the story line, the secondary characters added to the depth, and for
the most part, it moved along smoothly.
I really liked Nikki as a character. Her bitterness in
the beginning towards ball players was a little unfounded to me. I didn’t think
it was fair to dislike the sport and players because her ex-husband lost money
betting on it. The phase doesn’t last long though, so I began to enjoy her
character very quickly. She’s talented and independent, strong, beautiful,
humble, and has a great personality once you get past the stiff librarian
attitude that she exudes in the beginning (albeit, necessary to go up against
these guys in the beginning). One of my favorite things about Nikki is that she
isn’t a doormat. When Jake does something stupid and “guy like,” she doesn’t
flip out or become whiney or petty, rather she is aloof, seemingly unaffected.
This unusual attitude throws the guy off.
Jake is easy to love
throughout 90% of the story. He is generous, good natured, funny, sexy,
talented, determined…shall I go on? The way he treats Nikki is incredibly
sweet. He just melted my heart with some of his thoughts and actions. At first,
I thought he was accepting his growing feelings of commitment, in fact, he seemed
more committed than Nikki, so I was sort of blindsided when his fear of
commitment was all of the sudden and huge stumbling block, but in the chapter
right before, his thoughts and words made it sound like he had moved beyond it.
The chemistry between
Nikki and Jake is thick with sexual tension in all the right ways. There are
some deliciously romantic moments and some deliciously wicked moments. They
burn up the pages with the sparks they set off.
There were a few little
nuances that would pull me out of the story, such as using the term “little
boy” to describe Jake, i.e. his “little boy smile.” This term was tough for me
to get past, even though I know that she was going for the idea of him being
“boyishly” handsome. The difference in those two phrases can be vast, one of which
seems a little inappropriate. She stopped using it early on though, so it wasn’t
there to bother me throughout the whole book.
It’s definitely a solid
four stars for me. When I reached the end, I was satisfied and I could
definitely say that it was a fun and sexy read.
Award-winning historical author Katie Rose makes her
contemporary debut with the Boys of Summer novels, Bring on the Heat and Too
Hot to Handle, which combine Katie’s true loves: baseball and romance! When not
watching baseball, Katie is at her lake house in New Jersey, hard at work on
her next book.
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