Hi there! I’m excited to share a review for SOME SORT OF LOVE out today from Melanie Harlow. This is a contemporary romance featuring a woman who’s sacrificed to get her career and a man who’s sacrificed to care for his son. They make the best of a tough courtship, and bring out the best in each other. Having loved FRENCHED and FORKED by Ms. Harlow, I was eager to get my hands on this one!
Check out my review below and be sure to enter the $25 GC giveaway!
About the book:
On the surface, I have it all—a career I adore, a loving family, the Nixon metabolism but not the Nixon ears, and a salary that supports my lavish taste in designer shoes, fine wine, and lacy lingerie…but I have no one to share it with.
Until the day I run into him—my one night stand from college with the cocky smile, let’s-get-out-of-here eyes, and dirty, dirty mouth.
Levi Brooks is six feet four inches of hot bearded fantasy. A sexy single dad with broad shoulders, strong hands, and a fantastically big…heart. (I mean, it’s massive. And generous. And it pumps so hard… um. Sorry. Lost my place.)
But he lives for his son, and he’s keeping me at a distance because he thinks I deserve someone better—a man who can give me more time, more attention, more of himself. He doesn’t believe he could ever be enough.
But he’s wrong.
He’s everything.
How about a little taste?
“So.” I glanced out the windows to the patio. “You want to go back out there?”
“Not really,” she said.
“You want to get out of here?”
She grinned. “Yeah. I do.”
I watched her rush up the stairs to get her things, and as soon as she was out of sight, I adjusted myself in my pants. My dick had jumped to life the second she said yeah, I do, as if the question had been you want to get naked and fuck? rather than something much less suggestive. Not that I didn’t want to get naked and fuck—hopefully I’d last a little longer than I had in the broom closet eleven years ago—but I didn’t want to make her feel like that’s what I expected. She wasn’t a horny nineteen-year-old college student anymore; she was a doctor, for fuck’s sake. She was beautiful and smart and mature and sophisticated, and a woman like her did not want some Neanderthal who probably needed a haircut and a new pair of shoes to throw her up against a wall for a five-minute fuck.
A woman like that deserved attention all night long. She deserved someone who would undress her slowly and delight in each new inch of her skin as it was revealed. Someone who would run his hands all over her body and find out where she liked to be touched, how she liked to be touched, what she wanted to hear whispered to her in the dark. Someone who would wrap those gloriously long legs around his neck and use his tongue until she begged for his cock, then use his cock until she begged for mercy.
Fuck. I could be that guy.
Except I couldn’t be. Not tonight. Because I wasn’t a horny college student anymore either—I was just a horny single dad who didn’t have the luxury of taking a woman home and lavishing all my time and attention on her the way I wanted to.
As soon as I had the thought, I felt guilty. Scotty was the love of my life and always would be, and whenever I felt the slightest bit resentful about something I couldn’t do because of him, that resentment was immediately crushed by shame. He didn’t ask to be born wired differently, into a terrible relationship, to a mother who would decide she couldn’t handle being a parent, to a father who wasn’t prepared for any of it. He was completely innocent, and he needed me to be a better man.
Running a hand through my hair, I exhaled and wondered if I should ask Jillian for a raincheck on a night when Scotty’s usual sitter could be there. If he woke up again and I wasn’t home yet, he might never get back to sleep. We’d be up all night, tomorrow would be miserable, and the whole start to the week would be off.
But she was so beautiful. And I hadn’t been this attracted to someone in so long.
“Fuck,” I muttered, checking my watch. What was the right thing to do? If she were a different sort of woman, if her brother-in-law weren’t my friend and client, if we lived three states apart…if any number of circumstances were changed, I’d grab her hand, drag her out to my car, and spend the next thirty minutes fucking her brains out in the back seat. It would feel so good to take control that way, to lose control that way, to release some of this fucking tension. But was that fair to her?
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
“Hello?”
“He’s up again.” Monica’s voice was strained, and in the background I heard the familiar keening of a nighttime meltdown. My chest hurt, the way it always did when Scotty was upset.
“Shit. OK, I’m on my way. Twenty minutes, OK? Thirty at the most.”
“OK.”
“Tell him he can play on his iPad.”
“That’ll just rile him up more. He’s tired. He needs to go to sleep.”
I clenched my fist. “Just do it, OK? It will help calm him until I get there.”
As I ended the call, I heard footsteps above, and then Jillian appeared at the top of the stairs carrying a small suitcase. I watched her descend, the tightness in my chest growing. Also the tightness in my pants. “Hey.”
“Hey,” she said, her face concerned as she reached the ground and saw my expression. She set down the suitcase. “What’s up?”
Sighing, I put my phone back in my pocket. “I have to get home. Scotty woke up and he’s upset.”
“Oh.” She tried to hide it, but I saw the disappointment in her eyes.
“I’m really sorry. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”
“That’s OK. I understand.”
“Can I call you?”
“Of course.” She smiled, and her lips looked so soft and inviting, I took a step closer.
If you kiss her, it will be that much harder to leave.
I knew it was the truth, but I couldn’t help myself. One kiss. Just one. And then I’ll go. I moved even closer and took her head in my hands.
The curve of her smile deepened. “What are you doing?”
“I’m thinking about kissing you.”
“Stop thinking.”
I lowered my lips to hers and let them rest there, fully intending the kiss to be short and sweet, just a goodnight.
But I couldn’t break it off. I wanted more—I wanted to taste her. Slanting my head, I changed the angle of the kiss, teasing her mouth open with mine, slipping my tongue between her lips. A little sigh escaped her, and my dick jumped to life again.
You have to go, you have to go, you have to go.
But her hands were moving up my chest and my fingers were sliding into her soft brown hair and I could smell something sweet and citrusy on her skin and it mingled with the taste of whiskey on my tongue and oh God, I wanted my tongue everywhere on her body. I wanted make her come with it just so I could hear that little sigh again and again and again. And I wanted to feel my hands in her hair just like this while she got on her knees and took my cock between her lips, looking up at me with those big blue eyes…
Groaning, I forced myself to take my lips off her before I completely lost my senses. “God, I wish I could stay,” I said, resting my forehead against hers. “I wish a lot of things.”
“I know.” She played with my tie again. “I wish I was taking this tie off you, not straightening it.”
“What a coincidence, that’s one of my wishes too.”
She laughed and kissed me quickly. “Another time, maybe. You better go.”
My Review:
This is the third book in a series, and can be enjoyed as a standalone.
Jillian is a 30 y/o pediatrician living in small-town Michigan with her exuberant and close-knit family always wondering “when will you settle down?!” which would be easy to ignore if her two younger sisters hadn’t recently found their perfect mates. It’s at her sister’s wedding that Jillian literally runs into a man from her past.
Levi was a super-hot one-night stand that has kinda haunted her dreams. Well, the kinky ones, that is. Just as Jillian’s getting the Let’s Get It On vibe under control, she learns that Levi has a child.
Ack!
But…no wife! Nope, Levi’s a single father to his 8 y/o autistic son, Scotty. These are not hurdles, per se, but they are stumbling blocks at the very least.
The attraction is real, the sex is copious and smoking hot, and the feels are RIGHT THERE ON THE PAGE, but the relationship is doomed!!! Doomed, I tells you, because Levi is sooooo abso-freaking-lutely terrified that Jillian might come into his and Scotty’s life and not be able to handle it, and walk away leaving him bereft, that he doesn’t want Jillian to meet Scotty… pretty much ever.
*shakes head* *tries to understand Levi’s point* *fails miserably*
I really really liked this book. I liked Jillian and her sisters, and Levi and Scotty and all the great people in Levi’s life telling him to take blasted chance on Jillian because there really is no chance here: Jillian’s smitten with Levi, and she knows all about autism, and is chomping at the bit to try, try, try with them. I didn’t like Levi’s pigheadedness, though I understood from where it all came.
This is a solid sexy romantic read with real characters who struggle even when they know they have found a serious love. That was real, for me. Knowing families with kids “on the spectrum” Levi and Scotty’s life seemed chillingly realistic. The resolution is truly happy dance material, and on point for this new, and challenged, family. Fans of the series will enjoy the call backs of Jillian’s sisters who each have their happy endings to share…more than once!
Interested? You can find SOME SORT OF LOVE on Goodreads, Amazon (US and UK) Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and iBooks.
ALSO AVAILABLE IN THE HAPPY CRAZY LOVE SERIES
#1 Some Sort of Happy
#2 Some Sort of Crazy
****GIVEAWAY****
Click on this Rafflecopter giveaway link for your chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card.
Good luck and keep reading my friends!
About the Author:
Melanie Harlow likes her martinis dry, her heels high, and her history with the naughty bits left in. When she’s not writing or reading, she gets her kicks from TV series like VEEP, Game of Thrones, House of Cards, and Homeland. She occasionally runs three miles, but only so she can have more gin and steak.
Melanie is the author of the HAPPY CRAZY LOVE series, the FRENCHED series, and the sexy historical SPEAK EASY duet, set in the 1920s. She lifts her glass to romance readers and writers from her home near Detroit, MI, where she lives with her husband, two daughters, and pet rabbit.
Catch up with Melanie online on her website, Author page, Facebook, and twitter.
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