Two strangers (Antonio Chatsfield and Orla Kennedy) meet in a bar in a London Chatsfield hotel, hit it off, and spend the night together making love (without revealing their names to each other).

The next day they unexpectedly meet again at a business meeting. (Orla's family's hotel business, the Kennedy Group, is failing. The popular Chatsfield hotels are interested in buying them out.) Tensions flare between Orla and Antonio.

Orla loves the family hotel business. Her father started the Kennedy Group hotel chain in Ireland and then moved to England. But due to her father's bad judgment their hotel business is now failing. Orla and Antonio get to know each other better while Antonio stays at the Kennedy hotel for a while during the planning of the takeover…

This was a really enjoyable read. Orla and Antonio had great chemistry.

Orla was a sweet and strong heroine. When she was nine she overheard her father say he wished he had a son to work in the family hotel business with him, so Orla worked extra hard proving that she could do it as good as a son could. I liked Antonio who was tall, dark, and gorgeous. He was in the French Foreign Legion for many years and he has now come home at the request of his sister to help her out with the Kennedy Hotel deal.

I liked the hotel themed story and the nice settings. Orla and Antonio were a good main couple. This book also had many sexy love scenes. An entertaining read by Abby Green. ( )

Originally published on Tales to Tide You Over

Abby Green offers an interesting installment in the Chatsfield series by pairing a man who is living up to his family obligations after running away from them for years with a woman who has given up everything for her family business. The conflict between the two is straightforward in that Antonio Chatsfield is charged with negotiating the purchase of Orla Kennedy’s father’s dream, a hotel empire he built up from practically nothing which is now shuddering on the edge of collapse because of her mother’s expensive tastes.

Add that Orla has always fought to prove herself a worthy heir rather than being dismissed as a girl, and Antonio chose the French Foreign Legion to disappear as a young man, and things are complicated enough one would think.

But that’s not what this story is about.

No, in Rival’s Challenge with all these pressures and obligations, Orla gives herself one moment to relax in the arms of a stranger, acting completely out of character but enjoying the anonymity of forgetting who she is as much as he seems to want to step outside of his normal life as well, both adopting other names even. It’s a one night stand of mind-blowing passion, but that’s all it can ever be.

When Orla wakes in the morning, she’s stunned and wants to linger, but she knows her duties.

The trouble comes when her Marco turns out to be Antonio and his Kate is Orla.

This is where Abby Green turns an uncomfortable situation into a complex dance of loyalties, trust, and desire.

Their attraction is as strong as ever, but so are their family obligations. How can they trust each other when this connection, sexual or something more, is an all too easy angle to manipulate and get the better of the bigger issue of their business negotiations?

I enjoyed watching them try to figure their way through to love without betraying their families or each other. This is a situation where even the truth could be a lie and they have good reasons to use every possible advantage. Even saying they are not could be leverage.

I’m not one to hate misunderstanding romances because I believe life is full of misunderstandings and assumptions that can be hard to work through once they’ve taken hold. However, what made this book a strong one was the complex understandings that lead them astray.

Marco and Orla understand each other on a deeper level than most because when it comes down to it, they have much in common. Sure, they chose very different ways of dealing with it in the past, but the root, their families, is shared. It’s a strange situation to be in where they can see exactly why the other would betray, and can’t fight against it because they would do the same.

There’s explicit, and emotional, sex, romantic moments as well as mercenary ones, and characters with a lot going on under their respective business suits. A fun read with a lot to offer, Rival’s Challenge releases on September 19th.

P.S. I received this title from the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review. ( )