Just Finished:
Synopsis: When Ethan agreed to work at a sawmill his family is purchasing, he didn't foresee getting fired on his first day. He should be mad at the fiercely outspoken female foreman, but something about her seems disconcertingly familiar--even though Ethan is sure he'd remember meeting a stunning beauty like Anna Segee before.

Anna has never forgotten Ethan--or the schoolgirl crush she had on him before her father whisked her off to Canada. Now the shy, gangly girl is grown up and back in Oak Grove with a new name, new confidence and a newly inherited mill of her own. Her superb reputation in a male-dominated industry hasn't come easy, but even harder will be ignoring the sexy man Ethan has become....

My Thoughts: Janet Chapman only mildly disappointed me with this second installment of The Logger series (I’ll get to that in a moment). The book gets off to a fun start when Anna Segee fires Ethan for stepping in front of her loader, not knowing that his family is the new owner of the sawmill and, in essence, are her new bosses.

From there, the arguments just keep getting better. The fun just keeps on coming when Ethan moves into an empty cabin at Abby’s property, but invites himself to sleep in her home because the cabin isn’t exactly up to code for anyone to live in. Anna finds him to be as overbearing as her father and four over-protective brothers that she left behind.

I enjoyed the sparks between Anna and Ethan from the start. In that, Janet Chapman didn’t disappoint. What I didn’t like really had nothing to do with the story. It was the fact that Paul, the playboy of the Knight family, wouldn’t be getting his own story. His HEA was tidily pieced together in just a few pages of this book, and really disappointed me. I wanted to see Paul fall for a strong woman just like his brothers Ethan and Alex did.

Like I said, the only disappointment I felt had nothing to do with Ethan and Anna. Their story was excellent and kept me engaged from beginning to end.

Verdict: This was Very Good. I highly recommend it!

Labels: Contemporary Romance, Janet Chapman, Pocket, Very Good

Just Finished:
Synopsis: He set out to seduce her for all the wrong reasons -- but found himself falling in love with her for all the right ones.

Alex Knight is dead -- or so everyone thinks. A widowed logger baron with a risk-taking streak, he took on a South American engineering project and was reported dead after a rebel attack. So when he turns up back in Maine very much alive, his grieving family is shocked. But the biggest shock is Alex's, when he discovers he's now married -- to a woman he's never met.

Sarah Banks is ready for a change from running a quiet Bed & Breakfast, and working for the Knight family offers not only a bigger opportunity, but also the family life she yearns for. So she's glad to help secure custody of Alex's orphaned children, whom she's come to love, by marrying their father by proxy before he's legally declared dead. But when Alex returns, the sexy, determined woodsman upends all of Sarah's plans. Because suddenly she's married to a passionate stranger with an easy smile...and tumbling headlong into a fiery dance of seduction.

My Thoughts: I don’t think I’ve ever read a story before where the hero was presumed dead and comes home to find himself married to a woman he’s never met. I’m sure there may be more books like this out there, but I’ve never read them. So, I was interested in how JC was going to pull this unbelievable theme off. But then I started reading and from Sarah and Alex’s first meeting I was hooked. They had unbelievable chemistry right from the start that just continued to grow as the book went on.

Then there is the rest of the Knight family: Grady, the matchmaking schemer of a patriarch; Ethan, the gun-shy middle brother; and Paul, the youngest brother, a flirtatious lady’s man who is never at a loss for a date; and Tucker & Delaney, Alex’s children that Sarah adopted when she believed him to be dead. There are also the two side characters: John Tate, the local sheriff and Daniel Reed, the local Fish & Game Warden. I can only hope that they will all eventually get their own stories.

Alex was an awesome hero. I love how he and Sarah would try to best each other by coming to the rescue of each other, all ideas they each got by reading Sarah’s romance books. It was just hilarious. I had several laugh out loud moments as the two continuously tried to one-up each other throughout almost the whole length of the book.

Verdict: This was Very Good. I didn’t want this story to end. I got sucked in to the world of the Knight family and their Maine home from the very beginning and could not put the book down. I am anxiously looking forward to reading Ethan’s story, The Stranger in Her Bed, and sincerely hope that Ms. Chapman finishes this series.

Labels: Contemporary Romance, Janet Chapman, Pocket, Very Good