HURTS TO LOVE YOU

A playboy tattoo artist and a beautiful heiress help one another look beneath the labels to find true love.

The third and final installment of Rai’s (Wrong to Need You, 2017, etc.) Forbidden Hearts series focuses on Evangeline Chandler, a sheltered heiress with "a princess problem" who yearns to escape the shadow of her family’s dynasty and forge her own path as an entrepreneur. Conducting market research by working in disguise as an on-demand private driver has the added benefit of putting Eve in regular proximity to her hard-partying crush, Gabriel Hunter. Gabe is attracted to Eve, but as the tattoo studio–owning son of the Chandlers’ housekeeper, he doesn’t think he has a chance. When a scheduling mishap puts them together, alone, in the days before a big family wedding, Eve and Gabe get the mental and physical space they need to work on their issues and get to know each other. While their sexual attraction generates heat, their emotions drive the romance. In particular, Eve must come to terms with the impact of her father’s emotional abuse. And there’s a big secret buried beneath Gabe’s public image as a hard-partying playboy. Eve learns Gabe is “a three-dimensional human. Not a perfect flawless cutout she could impose a crush on,” and he learns the same about her, making each more, not less, irresistible. Since both protagonists’ character arcs involve family sagas that have unfurled over the prior two books in the series, Rai has to walk the line between giving too much and too little backstory. Sometimes the romance plot, sexy as it is, suffers.

A heartfelt, satisfying conclusion to the saga of the Kanes and Chandlers, with a sweet, if slightly shortchanged, romance.