Another good HP. I've been lucky lately on that front. Here we have the very realistic set up of a woman who has been a firefighter for 10 years and who is getting burnt out with all the stress and tragedy. She saves the daughter of the hero from a fire and they find out that he is her cousin's ex husband who she had a crush on 15 years ago. But she hates him now because of the nature of his breakup with her cousin. He has the hots for her and tries a bunch of ways to get her into be with him. He is a very rich man and values that she doesn't want his money and keeps turning him down when he asks her out etc. That of course just eggs him on. He knows that she really means it and is not playing hard to get. She was much stronger than most HP heroines. She eventually gives in of course and ends up pregnant. What a shock! Good thing I like baby stories, so sue me. :-)

She takes a job as his daughters companion. This is one of the things that wasn't so perfect in the book. The daughter was written as a very self contained secretive child and the hero wants the heroine to help her be more outgoing. Which she does but it was sort of in a presto! kind of way and wasn't really dealt with realistically. Those sorts of children are that way for a reason even if it's just that they are wired that way and they don't change overnight. But there is only so much room in an HP so I'll forgive it.

My bigger problem with the story is it takes her so long to figure out that her cousin had lied about the breakup. The cousin had cheated and left him and voluntarily given up custody of the daughter. They way the relationship between the cousins was written, it was pretty ludicrous that this otherwise intelligent and grownup woman didn't believe the hero's side of the story pretty much immediately. But that conflict hung on for most of the book.

Still the book was very welll written, characters well developed and interesting. In fact they are some of the most fully realized characters I've read in an HP. I loved that she was a fire fighter and that she was portrayed as burnt out because I think that was extrememly realistic. POV from both characters helped with characterizations.

Recommended for HP readers. ( )