Katelyn Powell has been a widow for ten months, after her husband Mason died in a car accident. She and her twin daughters, Elle and Peyton, are having difficulty adjusting to life without him, but she takes a job as manager for a band whose lead singer, Liam, is an old friend of her husband’s.
Her situation isn’t made any easier by the band’s drummer, the handsome and tattooed Harrison James, also a single parent – his son Quinn’s mother dropped Quinn off when he was three days old, and hasn’t seen either of them since. Harrison falls hard for Katelyn right away, and adores her girls to boot. But despite sharing the attraction, she can’t cope with his bad-boy image, and doesn’t think she will ever have the right to a romantic relationship with a man other than her late husband. Can he get past her defenses?
There are some rather sweet aspects to this love story, particularly where the kids are concerned (the kids are the best part of the book, actually, and have real kid personalities instead of merely being cute cartoon caricatures of kids). Harrison is a really nice guy, and he’s got a lot of patience and good sense; Quinn got seriously lucky in his dad.
However, the characters, particularly Katelyn, spend a great deal of time fretting and brooding, which gets tiresome very quickly. The book spends a lot of time giving every detail of each character’s thought processes, rather than letting them show what they’re thinking in their actions and dialogue.
Katelyn is also far too ready to believe the worst of Harrison, to the point of trusting an obviously fake stranger’s obviously lying assertions about their relationship without even talking to him first. The plot involving Liam’s near-sociopathic ex-girlfriend, Sam, is a bit over the top, and for the drama involved, the resolution is surprisingly quick and easy. The book needs editing, too – there are too many typos and grammar errors (particularly with respect to punctuation).
This is a somewhat sweet love story that could be a lot sweeter with a little less dithering and a little more action.
Reviewed by Catherine Langrehr for IndieReader