Head Over Heels by Jennifer DawsonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Three and a half stars.
Sophie Kincaid's dream PR career in Chicago goes up in flames when her boss embezzles money from the firm to feed his coke habit, as a Vice-President she is tarred with the same brush and overnight her name is mud. She retreats to small town Illinois, Revival to be precise where one of her best friends has got her a job in city government assisting the town revitalisation project. Her friend has also found her a house to rent for six months. And that's where the problems begin, because the guy living next door, Ryder Moore, has bad boy written all over him and there's one thing that Sophie has learned is that bad boys are catnip for her - and it always ends badly.
Ryder moved to Revival to get away from wild and crazy girls and his new neighbour, and tenant, has wild and crazy written all over her. He knows he should stay away but there is something so very tempting about arguing with her...
Sophie is less than pleased to find out that no only is Ryder her landlord as well as her neighbour but he is also the deputy sheriff AND technically her boss on the town square grand opening project! Can't a girl catch a break?
Inevitably lust trumps logic and Sophie and Ryder enter into a no-holds barred friends-with-benefits relationship, time limited by Sophie's often expressed intention to return to Chicago after six months. Ryder is small-town through and through, there's no way he would ever want to be a big city cop.
I've see-sawed to and fro on my rating for this book. I'm a sucker for big city girl moves to small town stories and I love enemies to lovers stories but I had two issues with this book:
1) the naughty bits - it took me a while to realise what felt off about the sex - there was more fade to black than actual sex. There's lots of mentions of all the depraved and possibly illegal things that Sophie and Ryder do but not an awful lot of seeing them do those things. The only thing they seem to do is have a lot of exhibitionist alfresco sex. (view spoiler)
2) both Sophie and Ryder were too willfully blind, I appreciate that a romance novel doesn't really work unless one or both of the characters cant see what is right in front of them but purlease!
I also, just a little bit, wished that the ending had been less predictable, it was done well but part of me wanted either the end to be ambiguous or for it to work out differently.
This is, apparently, the fourth book in a series. I had no problems reading this as a stand-alone although it was clear from all the recently paired-up, disgustingly good-looking couples in the book that this was part of a series.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in return for an honest review.
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