This one really comes before #6 and it was good but not quite what I was expecting. I think I liked 'Blue-eyed Devil' better as in more likely to reread. Both would be recommended though for readers of contemporary romance.

Liberty Jones grows up in a Texan trailer park with her single mom and her mom's many (useless) boyfriends. When her mother dies, she has to raise her sister Carrington on her own. Life is hard with no money and hardly any education, but there seems to be an anonymous benefactor who helps Liberty when she really needs it...then there's Hardy Cates, whom she fell in love with when she was a teenager and whom she meets again when she's grown up. But she also has a budding relationship with mega-rich Gage Travis. Now she has to choose between two lovers.
Liberty's story is easily readable and very entertaining, but also a bit shallow. Liberty is hardly ever really desperate, which she should be, considering her circumstances. At the end of the story, she's in a loving relationship and incredibly wealthy, but all of this happened without her contributing very much to her success. Still, Liberty is a likable protagonist who cares for her young sister and doesn't forget her friends from the trailer park, even when all her new friends are millionaires. There was something I wondered about though: there are no really mean characters in the book. It is fiction, of course, but even in fiction, the protagonists usually have to defeat a villain before they can have their happy end. ( )

There are many things about this book that I did not like.

I only read it because I wanted to know the background of Hardy Cates, whom I first read about in the 2nd book of the series, Blue-Eyed Devil.

Half of this book is spent describing Liberty Jones' childhood. It wasn't compelling reading and I skimmed a lot of it because of this. i despised her mother for allowing Liberty be the parent of Carrington at such a young age.

Once Liberty meets Churchill Travis the story actually begins. But, wait...then there is suddenly a 3 or 4 year gap! And we are supposed to just believe that during those 3 or 4 years Liberty and Hardy had plain, dull, unworthy of reading about discussions? I was confused by this. Why does Ms. Kleypas think that the readers want to hear the drivel coming out of the mouths of the trailer park tennents, but not one of the richest men in Houston?

I could not believe that Liberty thought that Churchill's attentitiveness to only her at the salon was normal behavior. I'll bet the other salon girls despised her for her having lunch with him and not coming back to work. Ms. Kleypas conviently skips over the part where the rest of the world sees Liberty's behavior as being a gold digger, and appears very whorish. I suspect this is why the story is told in first person, with Liberty telling the story. This way the author can hide behind LIberty's ignorance. Whatever. I just wanted to read more about Hardy and was glad that I already knew how he ends up in the next book.

Gage was an interesting guy and the tension between he and Liberty rang true. I actually enjoyed the last quarter or so of the book.

Clearly a 3rd book is coming about the practically non-existent brother...Jack? He's so forgetable, I can't even remember his name.

I wondered why on earth Liberty didn't keep in touch with Hannah Cates?

And these books do not make me want to ever visit Texas. ( )

It took me a while to get into this book. I have always enjoyed Kleypas' historicals, so I was a little nervous about her move to contemporary romance. Also, not being a fan of reading about Sugar Daddy relationships I was a bit nervous about the relationship between Liberty and Churchill.

There was a LOT of time spent on her youth and I feel that some of it was necessary to explain Liberty's character, however more time could have been spent on other things, such as the development of the relationship between LIberty & Gage.

One other comment is that I found a lot of the generalizations about Texans, Texan men and Houstonians to be somewhat annoying. Many of them were perpetuating stereotypes that don't necessarily apply & some of the references completely confused me which, as a native Houstonian, I felt shouldn't be the case. This is relatively harmless, just a bit annoying to somebody familiar with the area. ( )

Liberty Jones loves her baby sister Carrington from the minute she lays eyes on her, which is what gets her through the tough times after their mother dies and Liberty has to take full responsibility for Carrington. She survives when Hardy, the love of her teenage life, splits and manages to make her way through beauty school to work at one of Houston's most exclusive salons. There she meets billionaire Gage Travis and is offered the chance to live a great life as his assistant. Just as she's settling in, Hardy comes back and Liberty must choose what matters most to her. Entertaining and totally engrossing. I read it in one sitting. ( )