For anyone who enjoyed the first six books from this series, the release of a seventh is pretty exciting. It’s been seven years since #6, after all.

This book follows Lexie Kowalsky, the now-grownup daughter of Georgie and John from book #1. She’s started her own business, making clothes for dogs. In order to get more exposure for her company, she signs up for a Bachelor-style show with a country flavor called Gettin’ Hitched. Then she ends up winning, with the culmination being a required wedding to the bachelor in question. But Lexie realizes she can’t go through it at the last minute and absconds.

Sean Knox is a new member of the Seattle Chinooks team. He has a frustrating and manipulative mother who’s convinced him to fly back to Canada to see her because she’s “dying” (something that happens over and over until she makes yet another miraculous recovery).

The two meet when the pilot of the small plane Sean has chartered insists on waiting for another passenger, who turns out to be Lexie literally running from her wedding. She manages to get into the plane, but it’s a comical ordeal in her poofy dress. So the setup’s funny enough and there are lots of subsequent laughs to be had. After some media developments, Lexie convinces Sean to be her fake boyfriend that made the Gettin’ Hitched guy a rebound relationship.

However, I had trouble with the book. For one thing, I could never relate at all to Lexie. She’s way too different from me. A bigger problem was Sean, who I never really liked. He keeps her in the dark about who he is for too long. The chemistry between them wasn’t as good as in Gibson’s other books. I felt like I was being told they were really into each other rather than shown. Additionally, I didn’t love the way the romance developed and I really thought the book was a little longer than necessary (and once we had Lexie on the actual plane, it was a little slow to develop).

Despite that, the characters are believable and realistic. Lexie will be familiar because she’s a lot like Georgie, with a lot of the same attitudes and speech patterns (this isn’t a criticism), which are quite unique in the book. Sean is true to the laconic hockey player type in dialogue and in his head. The storyline of Lexie’s business is both funny and nice to watch as she’s basically successful, even if the resolution is a little underwhelming.

Fans of the series will probably want to read this one, but I wouldn’t recommend starting in the series with it.

First off, I love the title of this book. It’s so perfect.

Of course anyone who’s read any of the other Brooklyn Bruisers books knows about Becca and Nate. Nate is a very successful tech mogul and Becca’s been his assistant for seven years. A couple years earlier, he moved her to the Brooklyn Bruisers office when he bought the NHL team. Becca doesn’t know why and has always thought she did something to fall out of his favor. Because they were buddies for so long.

Becca’s a distinctly nice girl. She had to drop out of college when her father died and that’s when she landed the job with Nate’s company. Now, she’s helping to support her younger sister while she goes through college—by letting the sister and boyfriend and baby all live with her. It’s a bit wild and crazy at home, but she can’t imagine not helping out. In the midst of this chaos in her life, she slips and falls on the ice at work, hitting her head and giving herself a concussion.

Back in the early days, Nate had a fiancé, but something went wrong with that. And soon after, he started lusting after Becca. But she seemed inaccessible for one reason or another, and he never did anything about it. But when Becca gets hurt, he’s unable to keep himself from stepping in to help. His help is to offer her a place to stay away from her crazy apartment, so she can get some actual rest.

She’s a little weirded out at first, but when she does get some genuinely restful sleep, she’s in. But then she still doesn’t get better, and Nate’s sends her to a specialist who says she has additional, rarer damage from the fall. Dealing with this requires multiple therapy sessions a week that she struggles to pay for. (This is one thing that kind of annoyed me: Becca’s head injury would be covered by worker’s comp.)

It’s not in Nate’s house where they finally kiss. No, that takes place in a hotel room far away from New York. And it’s both hot and a little funny, because it catches Becca totally by surprise. But then there’s some confusion:

“Bec, listen—I will apologize again and get the fuck out of your room. But for the love of god, help me understand—are you pissed off about the kiss? Or are you pissed that I stopped?”

“That’s not an easy question!” Obviously.

His handsome face wrinkles with confusion. “But it’s multiple choice!”

Both Nate and Becca are well-drawn and deep characters. The sexual tension is great throughout and the release of that tension is also (should-be-)trademarked Bowen quality. I was a tiny bit meh about the grand gesture at the end, but I won’t spoil that for you. Other than that, it was perfect.

If you have read any of Bowen’s Brooklyn Bruisers books, you need to read this one. If you like hockey romances you should read it. And of course, if you like Bowen, you should read it. And although romances can actually be read out of order, to fully appreciate this one I’d recommend reading the first three Brooklyn Bruisers books first, since book #1 is really where this one starts.

Read on if you’r interested in more hockey hotness from Bowen and Kennedy. Stay is the second in the WAGs series (that’s wives and girlfriends for those of you not in the know) after Good Boy. And it features a cool girl and another hot hockey player.

Hailey Emery co-runs (with her ex-husband) her own business, a virtual assistant company called Fetch. They’re basically a concierge, finding services like dog-walkers and housecleaners, picking up and delivering items, and doing other such things for clients. She has one client whose account name is Sniper87 and she’s half convinced he’s the hockey star Matt Eriksson. Who she fancies. But she respects her client’s privacy and resists the temptation to peek at his profile details.

She’s not wrong. Matt’s on the same Toronto team as Blake and Wes, who we’ve seen in the earlier books. At 30, he’s getting old for the game and starting to feel it. He’s also unhappily single, with little time to do anything about it. His ex-wife’s deeply unpleasant and he doesn’t see his two daughters enough. He’s been using Fetch and the person he corresponds with the most is Hailey, or Hottie as he calls her (because her initials are all he sees—HTE). He’s seen a picture of a pretty woman on the site and decided it’s her, and he’s theoretically interested.

He’s not wrong either. How they finally get together is entertaining but not overly cutesy. First, the dog walkers she’s hired aren’t doing a good job with his dog—they’re snooping around his apartment, for instance. So she does the dog walking herself the next day, and he watches over his security cam and decides she really is the cute girl from the website photo. So they’re chatting about it over the Fetch messaging app, and he flirts with her a little because he assumes she knows who he is. He arranges to get her two tickets to the next home game, in a card labeled For HoTtiE. Things go from there, as they do.

Hailey’s pretty shy and although she’s been married before, she’s not really experienced much excitement. Matt takes on teaching her a little about life and… other things. The book is funny partially because of her inexperience and shyness, but there’s plenty of unrelated humor, too. There’s an ongoing thread with a client sending dick pics to Fetch which is pretty funny, especially when it gets explained near the end. As always, the dialogue’s good, the secondary characters are entertaining, and the ending’s satisfying. So if you like hockey romances, Bowen, or Kennedy, you’ll like this one.

Good Boy is the first in a spin-off series from the Him and Us books by the two authors (about Jamie and Wes), which I previously reviewed. Two of the side characters in Us, Blake (Wes’s teammate) and Jess (Jamie’s sister) reappear in this book as hero and heroine. Blake was probably the most significant secondary character in Us and I have to admit I found him a wee bit annoying. He’s a bit on the effervescent side and is always making up words that make little sense and just being silly in general. It probably says something about me that that annoys me, but whatever.

In Us, we find out that while Jamie is down for the count with a bad flu and Jess is supposed to be 100% focused on taking care of him, she instead hooks up with Blake, who has inserted himself in Jamie and Wes’s lives again.

In Good Boy, Jess is back in Toronto to plan and coordinate Wes and Jamie’s wedding, which brings her back in touch with Blake, who’s the best man. She’s a serial career-changer and although she was sure wedding-planning was going to be her permanent gig, actually carrying it out make her realize she doesn’t ever want to do it again. She has an epiphany based on when she was taking care of Jamie—she wants to be a nurse. So she moves to Toronto and starts nursing school there. She spends a lot of time with Jamie and Wes, which brings her in regular contact with Blake, as well.

He’s as interested in her as he was that afternoon in the chair in Wes and Jamie’s apartment. But she regards him as a mistake. She’s trying to get herself into proper adulthood and messing around with a giant goofball doesn’t seem the right thing to do. Actually, messing around with anybody seems the wrong thing to do. She’s trying to earn her family’s respect, after all.

The one problem? Their chemistry is off the charts. So eventually they do start hooking up but it’s not intended to be a long-term arrangement. How that comes about is a joy to watch. As always with Bowen and Kennedy, the writing is superb. They deliver with all the feels, dialogue, strong characterization, and hot sex that you would expect from them.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m relatively new to romance. Most women who’ve been reading it have been doing so since they were kids, but I only started a couple years ago. I’ve embraced it fully, but most of the canon is still new to me. So I’m reviewing another old book, because she was one of the first authors I read and she hooked me into the entire series and some of her others, too.

Rachel Gibson writes very strong alpha heroes, which isn’t my favorite type. However, she does it really well and I consistently enjoy her books even if I wouldn’t be able to stand the hero in real life (never mind that he wouldn’t have the time of day for me, either). I also would never have expected to enjoy sports romances, as I’m not into sports, either. However, Sarina Bowen taught me that a good hockey story is a little addictive.

So I came into Gibson’s first novel in a series centered around players on the fictitious Seattle Chinooks Hockey team a little unsure—would she be able to pull off the sporty, alpha in a way I could appreciate?

Yep. Despite some faults, I had trouble putting this book down.

In this secret baby/enemies-to-lovers tale, Georgeanne Howard flees her fiancé, the uber-wealthy owner of the Seattle Chinooks, the day of their wedding. One of the team’s players, John Kowalsky, inadvertently helps her get away. He takes her to his beach house so she can regroup and come up with a plan. This is the low point of her life, after all—she has no clothes except a tight dress and only 7 dollars in her wallet. Yet this is a romance novel, so it’s not surprising that they end up in bed together.

Georgie is young and naive, and she instantly falls for him. He, on the other hand, wants to stay out of trouble with the team owner, so he buys her a plane ticket back to Texas. She’s had a tough life with some kind of learning disability and has grown up thinking the only thing she can do is cook well and be friendly and charming. And she decides she doesn’t want to go back to her crappy life. So she stays in Seattle, landing a job at a catering firm (due to her cooking expertise, fortunately) and slowly working her way up until she’s a successful caterer herself. The only hitch: she got pregnant on the night with John, and she doesn’t tell him about their daughter, Lexie.

Seven years later, he finds out about Lexie, and he’s understandably pissed (even though it’s also somewhat understandable—though clearly wrong—that Georgie never told him). She reluctantly lets John into Lexie’s life, although she worries about his influence. But as it turns out, he adores Lexie and they get along very well.

Okay, so this book isn’t perfect. Georgie and John fight a lot and he really is a jerk for most of the book. He’s crude and rude in general, as well as specifically to Georgie. He sometimes tries to be better, but they still fight a lot, and that’s an issue I sometimes have with the enemies-to-lovers trope—are the things that were done and said during the enemy phase truly forgivable? I’m not entirely sure here, but I do believe Georgie forgave him. Also, Georgie thinking she’s fat at tall and 140 lbs. gets old. I mean, I know that’s the way it is, but still, annoying.

Gibson writes good characters, in the sense of being well-drawn and very distinct from each other. The dialogue is great and Georgie’s southern-inspired monologues (which John calls rambling and which drive him crazy when they first meet) are funny and fairly true-to-reality. Why use five words when you can do it with twenty? Gibson’s books also feature lots of palpable sexual tension that delivers when it should. I suppose these are the things that drew me into the story despite several potential issues for me.