Annabelle Jordan and her two sisters were little orphans in frilly dresses and ruffled panties when they went to live with their sports-lawyer uncle in his testosterone-fueled world of locker rooms, bookies and gambling.
Now the girls are all grown up, and publicists in their uncle’s firm, The Hot Zone. Yet Annabelle is all woman, despite her upbringing. And she’s naturally drawn to real men—like her latest client, ex-football legend and businessman Brandon Vaughn.
The chemistry is potent, undeniable…irresistible. But Annabelle soon realizes that Brandon is much more than just another jock. And that she’d better hold onto her panties if she doesn’t want to lose her heart…
I read this book several years ago when it first came out and absolutely loved it, so when I saw that I needed to read a Carly Phillips for RomCon I knew immediately which one I was going to read.
Annabelle has been assigned to be Brandon’s PR person and she has her work cut out for her. For a couple of reasons the main one being that she knows that she is attracted to Brandon and that this attraction is definitely not what she needs at the moment.
Brandon has come crawling back to the Hot Zone to represent him and he knows that having Annabelle as his rep is absolutely not a good thing because he has no time for any kind of attraction and he most definitely feels the attraction.
I loved reading these two’s story, Annabelle with her direct approach and Brandon with his avoidance. What Brandon wasn’t counting on was Annabelle deciding to take matters into her own hands and act on the explosive attraction that they are both feeling.
The conflict in this book wasn’t so much outside sources but more their individual insecurities. One of the things that I liked the most about this book after re-reading it is that she talks about how Brandon has been impacted by his learning disability, how the reaction of his parents to his success on the football field will never make up for the fact that he was a crappy student (even though he has dyslexia), and that it was all his fault. And Annabelle and how she has coped with becoming an orphan as a child and how everything that she does is based subconsciously on what she overheard the social worker say when she was a child.
One of the best parts of this series is the secondary story that starts in this book and concludes in the third book.
If you have never read a Carly Phillips book that I can safely say that by starting with this series you can’t go wrong.
I give this book a 4 out of 5
