Bad Boys Do is the second in the Donovan Brothers Brewery series. Jamie, the hero of this book, was portrayed as a total playboy in the first book, which I previously reviewed. He’s the bartender at his family’s brewery and got them in a lot of trouble with one of his sexual escapades. He hooked up with the daughter of a businessman for an airline they were trying to sell to, which ultimately resulted in a break-in because their alarm code was compromised. I don’t have a lot of patience for men like that, so I figured I wasn’t going to like this book as much as the first.

However, Jamie ended up being a much more sympathetic character than I expected in Bad Boys Do. There’s a lot more to his story than what we got in book 1. In fact, this one ended up being my favorite in the series. We do get to see a lot more of Tessa and Eric, the siblings he runs the brewery with. Tessa was featured in book 1 and Eric’s got book 3. They’re a close family but there is a lot of tension there, some for good reason, that doesn’t get entirely resolved until book 3. Eric, in particular, is really hard on Jamie, unable to get that he’s moved beyond his playboy days.

As I’ve implied, I loved Jamie, but I also loved Olivia. She’s a college professor, which I enjoy because I’d always thought that’s what I’d end up being (didn’t happen). She has an ex-husband who’s a total douche, not surprisingly. And she’s really struggling because she let herself be completely enveloped by his web and tried to be exactly what he wanted, losing herself in the process. So she’s struggling to redefine herself as a woman on her own again.

Jamie is secretly (secret from his family) taking a business class because he has some ideas on how to take the brewery in a new direction and wants to learn how to do it properly. It’s something that makes him a very sympathetic character because we know his family won’t take him seriously even though he’s passionate about his ideas.

They first meet when she attends a “book club” meeting that’s really just a girlfriend gathering at the Donovan brewery. She’s already uncomfortable because of the content of the meet up (sexual escapades and whatnot) and when the women she’s with make a big show of openly flirting with Jamie, who wears a kilt (which apparently a lot of women find very appealing*). Still, Olivia admires him along with the other women. And then her newest semester starts out—and it turns out Olivia is teaching the class Jamie’s taking.

When they do start dating (and it takes some work on Jamie’s part for that to happen), Olivia’s ex-husband threatens to out her to the administration, which might have a problem with her dating a student. So there’s concern about that, along with the fact that Olivia’s a little uptight, self-conscious, and a few years older than Jamie. It’s not clear how things will truly work out between them. Additionally, to complicate things among the Donovan siblings, the fallout from the break-in the brewery experienced (and Jamie’s ill-advised rendezvous) continues and finally gets explained. Olivia’s problem with her husband also get resolved satisfactorily. All in all, this was a great story with a lot going on, plus Dahl’s trademark high heat level.

* Okay, so a quick story about a man in a kilt. Men in Scotland really do wear them frequently, especially when expressing some kind of national pride, like when Scotland’s playing in a soccer match (though they wear them for about any soccer match…). One day when I lived in Glasgow, I was walking home through the city center at four a.m. after a bar shift, and I glanced over at a Chinese place that was still open. There was a man in a kilt manspreading in a booth, and I could see everything. They really don’t wear anything under those things.