Title: Tender Kisses Series: Grays of Los Angeles #1
Author: Sheryl Lister
Published: March 22, 2016
Genre(s): Romance: Contemporary
Page Count: 224
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Siobhan Gray has had it with men who view her as a stepping stone to a career with her family's successful home-safety company. Even when a sexy stranger sweeps her onto the dance floor at a gala awards event, the twice-burned PR director vows not to let down her guard. Siobhan doesn't count on Justin Cartwright's persistence as he dissolves her doubts and slowly wins her trust with a passion that tempts her to believe in love again.
Justin is a man with a plan: partner with Gray Home Safety to deliver his new cutting-edge product to the market. But the tall, sensual beauty is derailing all his best intentions. Then he discovers who she really is. Now he stands to lose everything…unless he can convince Siobhan that nothing matters more than their blossoming relationship—and the future they can build together.
In my continuing quest to read more category romance in 2018, I picked up Tender Kisses by Sheryl Lister (kind of at random) from my library. This is a sweet romance between two hard-working professionals, and I really loved it…until I didn’t.
What I loved about this book right away was how mature and breezy the characters were with their interactions. It was obvious from their first conversation that Justin and Siobhan were highly compatible and had a very easy chemistry between them. I also really liked that this is a romance where the characters go on dates like “normal” people? That doesn’t happen enough. Justin and Siobhan go out for coffee, for dinner, and on a weekend trip to Vegas. All very normal, couply-things to do.
The tension in the relationship comes from the fact that Siobhan initially lied to Justin about her name—she used her mother’s maiden name due to the sheer volume of men flirting with her in order to make business connections with her family. So, while on the one hand she’s completely sure that Justin loves her for herself, she also has to tell him that she lied to him, and she’s unsure of how he’ll take it. (Spoiler: he takes it very calmly, like an adult, and acknowledges she had valid reasons to do what she did.) Except then, Lister kind of went of the deep-end, because Siobhan finds out that Justin did want to pitch a product-idea to her dad the whole time, and she freaks out. Even though Justin literally made a huge point of becoming a business success on his own steam.
The problem with any romance, of course, is what the Dark Moment is and how the characters resolve it. In Tender Kisses, I felt the misunderstandings were excessive—both in number and in scope. The couple’s inevitable breakup over those misunderstandings was just…a little too melodramatic. Especially because as soon as the heroine, Siobhan, cools down from her temper, she realizes she assumed a bunch of things and freaked out with very little evidence. Which is fine! People do that all the time. It just wasn’t necessarily in keeping with her character as a cool, level-headed PR executive in a large company.
It’s one thing to have an established “impulsive” character fly off the handle and break up with their love interest, only to realize the next day that it was all a mistake. It was another to have the wonderful, mature Siobhan Gray do it.
So, that was a bummer.
