Book Review: Hurts to Love You by Alisha Rai

Title: Hurts to Love You
Series: Forbidden Hearts #3
Author: Alisha Rai
Published: March 27, 2018
Genre(s): Romance: Contemporary
Page Count: 384
Rating:

Summary from Goodreads:

Heiress Evangeline Chandler knows how to keep a secret . . . like her life-long crush on the tattooed hottie who just happens to be her big brother’s friend. She’s a Chandler, after all, and Chandlers don’t hook up with the help. Then again, they also don’t disobey their fathers and quit their respectable jobs, so good-girl rules may no longer apply.

Gabriel Hunter hides the pain of his past behind a smile, but he can’t hide his sudden attraction to his friend’s sheltered little sister. Eve is far too sweet to accept anything less than forever and there’s no chance of a future between the son of a housekeeper and the town’s resident princess.

When a wedding party forces Eve and Gabe into tight quarters, keeping their hands off each other will be as hard as keeping their clothes on. The need that draws them together is stronger than the forces that should shove them apart . . . but their sparks may not survive the explosion when long-buried secrets are finally unearthed.

All good things must come to an end, and that includes Alisha Rai’s Forbidden Hearts series. Being completely honest, Hurts to Love You wasn’t as good as the first two. Major plot threads needed to be wrapped up, and the entire story takes place as Livvy and Nicholas’s wedding gets underway. Not even counting the love story, there is a lot going on in this book. Sadly, that meant something had to give. The focus of the plot was not, in my opinion, as zeroed-in on Eve and Gabe as it could/should have been.

So, by this point, I’ve pretty much figured out that Rai has a few tropes she loves to go for. Also, the series is called Forbidden Hearts, so obviously that’s going to be at play here as it was with the previous books. In Hurts to Love You, Eve and Gabe have this whole Tortured Pasts and Secret Traumas thing going on, plus the fact that (for some reason?) any potential relationship between them is completely off-limits. I think it’s the 12-year age gap, but in truth, the “forbidden” aspect of this book was a bit shaky.

Anyway.

Unbeknownst to both of them, both protagonists have huge mental-boners for each other, so when they spend a week together at a remote villa, things happen. There is sex, there is angst. Lots of both, really.

I hate to say it, but Hurts to Love You just didn’t pack the oomph of the first two. I have a feeling it’s going to prove to be rather forgettable, all told (don’t worry! I forget almost all contemporary romances I read, so this book is in good company). The characters themselves are not really Rai’s strongest, and in my opinion, they weren’t as developed as they could be.

It doesn’t help that the Focal Point of the story, the Climax (no pun intended), has nothing to do with Eve and Gabe’s budding relationship. Rather, it has everything to do with the long, drawn-out Kane/Chandler family drama that Rai’s been winding up for a while. Suddenly, the book stopped being a story about two people finding love and happiness together, and started being a semi-histrionic story about a dysfunctional family and its labyrinthine feuds.

Listen, the reason there are no sequels to Romeo and Juliet is because the drama gets old, fast. And after three books, I was read to be done with it all. That’s not really the author’s fault or the book’s fault, but it does suck that at a critical moment in the story, Gabe and Eve had to play second-fiddle in their own romance novel. Just saying.