Fighting Love by Melissa West (Website, Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads)Also by this author: Collide (Entangled Teen), No Kissing Allowed (Entangled Embrace), Racing Hearts, Your B&B or Mine?, Wild Hearts, No Falling Allowed
Published by Kensington on January 24th 2017
Genres: Contemporary, Fiction, Romance
Pages: 288
The strapping, sun-kissed Littleton brothers of Crestler’s Key are hometown boys in every way, farming land that’s their family’s legacy. But these sexy bachelors won’t stay single for long…
Single dad Zac Littleton has always tried to make lemonade from life’s lemons, and striking a bargain with Sophie Marsh is no different. A relative newcomer to town, she needs his help convincing the locals to try her Fresh Foods Organics produce—and Zac needs to satisfy his preteen daughter’s pleas to get out and have fun. Fake-dating Sophie will kill two birds with one stone, at least for a while—unless he gets addicted to the sweet pleasure of his beautiful competitor’s company…
Sophie can’t stand Zac. Or maybe she simply can’t stand Littleton Farms beating her in sales every week. It’s true that pretending interest in Zac and his sculpted biceps and devilish smile is a lot easier than she expected, and much more tempting, too. But despite their all-natural attraction, Sophie’s past has left her wary of any man—even one as charming as Zac. Besides, he’s got trust issues of his own. If anything real can blossom between them, it’s going to take a whole lot of patience, persistence…and passion.
Fighting Love is the first in the new Crestler’s Key series by Melissa West and if you have read any of the Hamilton Stables series, you know that this means we now get to have the Littleton brothers’ stories which makes me happy!
This book focuses on Zac Littleton. He was first introduced to us in one of the Hamilton books and I was happy to see that we were going to learn more about him in this first book. Zac is a single dad whose only focus most days is his daughter and the family farm. He has some things in his past that makes him ok with avoiding dating and focusing on his daughter but all of that changes when he learns more about Sophie Marsh.
Sophie Marsh is a newcomer to Crestler’s Key and she has some competition with her organic produce company. She is trying to make a name for herself but everyone in town loves Zac and his brothers and because she is an outsider, they don’t trust her. The only way Sophie sees around this is to make a deal with Zac.
I loved how these two started out and the banter between them is one of my favorite things. They are both pretty competitive and while they are competing for business with each other, they also know they can help one another out. For Zac, Sophie can help him make his daughter happy by getting him out of the house and dating. For Sophie, Zac can be the “in” for developing some trust in the people of Crestler’s Key. What they didn’t really count on was that they would start feeling like this fake relationship could be something more.
Another layer to this story is Sophie’s backstory. I won’t say much here as I don’t want to give anything away but she was definitely running away from something. As the story moves forward, it is clear that Sophie has something in her past that impacts the way she sees herself as well as makes her wary of men. As things are revealed it made me like Sophie even more because she has shown her strength and determination to start over.
I know I have said this before but for anyone new reading my reviews, I love Melissa West’s stories. She develops such wonderful characters and the stories are usually more than just fluff. Fighting Love was a fairly quick read but it gave me everything I was looking for – great characters, an interesting story, and of course, some swoony romance. Definitely check this out when you can and don’t forget to read her other books as well.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the review copy.
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