Jake is driving Cassandra, a woman he is not sleeping with and has maybe dated a couple of times in the last six months, 300 miles to visit her mother in the country. Jake likes the English countryside because he’s a tourist, but he doesn’t seem to like Cassandra a great deal, and what the whole not sleeping with her, I can’t quite work out why he didn’t turn the car around for London when she finally dropped the 300 miles on him. It’s a good thing he didn’t, because at Cassandra’s mum’s house Jake meets Eve, the love of his life.
For reasons that will serve the plot but make very little sense, it’s somehow important that, while Eve is Cassandra’s mother, this is kept secret from Jake. It vaguely feels as though Eve is being treated badly, and needs someone to love her and rescue her from her wicked mother.
Cassandra isn’t really wicked, she just wasn’t that great at getting along with her family. Yes, she gave up baby Eve to a couple next door who seemed quite nice (but weren’t), and never told her mother that she’d had a baby until she had a medical scare and thought it might be a good idea to have Eve on hand if she needed a donor for something. While Eve observes early on that Cassandra and her mother are alike in their selfishness and stubbornness, the book makes it clear that Cassandra is mostly the villain, and everyone mostly likes the grandmother.
Eve is attracted to Jake, and tortures herself about falling for her mother’s boyfriend, and how she’d never get a boyfriend like Jake when someone as beautiful as her mother is around. She also has a hang-up about her deceased father, who was Cuban. This revealed as if it is some kind of stigma, and I don’t understand why. Racism, probably.
Eve is prickly. She teaches at the local school, looks after a nice old horse and her grandmother, but seems to do it all with this kind of cringing Cinderella~ishness that I didn’t understand. No one was taking advantage of her, and she didn’t need rescue. I didn’t think Eve was at all obliged to like her mother, because while objectively I don’t think Cassandra did anything wrong, I think Eve had the right to hate her. Sure, it would have been bad form to steal Jake for revenge, but Jake did most of the chasing, so Eve got to fall in love and only feel slightly dirty about it.
Jake’s family are rich and he’s rich and he lives in paradise. Apart from wondering what had attracted him to Cassandra in the first place, and what bent him so out of shape about not being told that Eve is Cassandra’s daughter (which, how is it his business what’s going on in their family anyway?), he comes across as a fairly pleasant and relatively low-key for a Harlequin Presents hero.
This was a fun read, but it didn’t always make a lot of sense.