Review: Hotblooded
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 11 13, 2011
The story starts out with a sexy bang *grin* as Jack meets Brooke, thinking she's the office cleaning lady, and has them in a lip lock and her top off within minutes. Jack's in town on a mission to help Brooke, and in his mind that help comes in the form of giving her $250,000 from his Uncle's life insurance policy. Brooke won't accept help from anyone for any reason, determined to put her time in at the small town clinic as a physician's assistant to prove to the town that she's nothing like her mother, who much of the town resents. Brooke's husband died in a car accident a few months back, and even though the town hasn't welcomed her with open arms, she's determined to stay due to a deal her late husband made: she stays in town, keeping the clinic staffed and her school bills will be paid in full once the contract she signed is up. So when Jack shows up with a hefty check in his pocket, she turns him down, and turns him on all at the same time.Brooke has always felt very isolated as the town hasn't exactly been friendly towards her, so she shut herself away, not doing anything more than she needed to at the clinic, always thinking the worst about the town and what they thought of her. She tried to be the exact opposite of her mom, dressing very conservatively, never really showing emotion, all trying to prove the town that they're wrong about her. All this served to do was alienate her even more, keeping people from venturing into the medical clinic, so when Jack sticks around and starts seeing patients and the clinic starts to be booked for full days, it's just one more reason for Brooke to, at first, get fed up with Jack, as he was earning the townspeople's respect so easily, but he gives her reason to open her eyes about how things really are. He makes her realize that her own behavior and beliefs about how she's perceived is mostly her own issue and that she needs to open herself up more to everyone around her, even if that means giving a smile, or just taking a trip to the local diner. For as much build up as there was about how much the town hated Brooke and was waiting for her to fail, it really came down to just 2 people in town that felt that way, everyone else saw Brooke as her own person and not her mother.Jack and Brooke have a relationship that starts out with instant attraction, but Brooke fights it, not wanting to do anything that's perceived as something her mother would have done. But Jack doesn't let that sway him and he sets out to make her see what could be between them - planning dates (that she constantly rejects) and ultimately working his way into her life when all she's thought about for so long was just making it through her clinic commitment and then getting out of town. Now he's messing with all her plans and making her see not only herself in a different way, but the town as well.**********"You make me crazy."He blinked. He made her crazy? What did that mean? He felt a grin begin to stretch his lips. Crazy could be a positive thing. In many ways, Brooke drove him crazy as well."Good crazy or bad crazy?" he asked.She frowned at him. "Crazy as in I'd like to shake all of that cockiness and charm right out of you. Crazy as in you make me want to scream. Crazy as in I hold my breath every morning waiting to see you."**********Fans of contemporary romance will enjoy this light, fun read by Erin Nicholas. I'm a fan of small town settings and while the buildup between Brooke vs. the Town maybe didn't end up being this big showdown we're led to believe is coming throughout the story, Brooke, with a little help from Jack, is able to put the past, specifically her mom's past, behind her and start to live her own life.Blog rating: 3.5/5