Review: A sweet romance with a soft, gentle passion to it
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 13, 2013
Usually when I go for sports romances, I pick football or hockey heroes, but I really enjoyed the baseball background to this one. This romance is with a hot, All-Star pro-baseball player, all big and blond and all-American. Really, he's a player off the field as well. Cole is almost too charming, almost too handsome for his own good, at first, but he soon won me over. A real sweetheart who's just looking for love in the wrong way. Cole's twenty-nine, a celebrity athlete used to partying and the casual hook-up, but that lifestyle isn't cutting it anymore. So his sports agent comes up with a plan to improve bad boy's image before contract-negotiation time, and this all leads to a pretend romance that soon becomes to feel very real.I love to see a hero blindsided like that. I love when a hero thinks he's got it all but then meets the one girl he can't live without. I really liked Liza, too. She knew Cole as a teenager and crushed on him then, but she's not so sure about this older Cole, the guy who dates models and starlets. Liza is a very sweet and genuine person with some pain in her recent past, but she still feels an attraction to Cole, even now, years later. So these two meet again, are kind of thrown together, and the pretend romance begins. Secrets are kept and some are revealed, and the main question is, is the romance real enough to last, despite why or how it started in the first place?Not an erotic romance, not overtly sexual or too steamy, the action is behind closed doors, and I think the real attraction of this story is the actual romance itself, which is heartfelt, tender, and built up in a very believable way. This is one you read when you want to feel the relationship develop and the romance deepen and become more. I loved seeing the bad boy fall for the good girl and want to put a ring on her finger, for real. Very good and sweet, romantic and lighthearted but still with some emotional substance to it, this story and its hero really hit the sweet spot for me.