Match Me If You Can as a book on CD read by Anna Fields was an amusing long-drive listen with a few LOL moments and only a couple of winces and eye rolls. The Chicago setting and realistic professional (and somewhat professional) women was appreciated. As in some of the Regency romance series the preponderance of gorgeous, marriageable guys in one place is somewhat questionable. Some of the twists and turns for the couple to get to their HEA were too much but overall the pacing was good. The reading was good for the adult female characters, okay for the hero, and objectionable for the three-year old daughter of one of the heroine’s BFFs.
This Heart of Mine occurs before Match Me If You Can and after It Had to Be You but does not need to be read in any particular order… but if you want to get into the series this is not a good place to start – I started skipping in Chapter 3 when the heroine rapes the hero. The incident might have passed a little less harshly if the two were at least dating (though date rape is still rape) but at that point in the story the hero only vaguely knows her as the mouthy younger sister of his boss. That aside, if you like alpha males getting vulnerable and heroines with image and self-esteem issues getting lots of attention from said alphas then you’ll enjoy this story more than I did. The little snippets of the characters from the heroine’s children’s books provided welcome moments of levity – though their gig in the Epilogue was pretty sappy. The side romance of a chronologically advanced twosome was, minus the woman’s dithering, a lot more interesting and sexy relationship than the main one – but maybe there wasn’t enough drama there to sustain 370 hardback pages.