Mini’s: The Temptation of a Good Man by Delaney Diamond & Behind the Mask by Carolyn Crane

Can true love be found after one night of passion?

Celeste Burton goes out with her girlfriends to celebrate turning thirty and winds up spending an unforgettable night with the man of her dreams. One week later, as a favor, she attends a wedding with a friend as his date and is shocked when she sees Roarke again.

Roarke Hawthorne despises cheating. Cheating tore apart his family years ago. When the physics professor sees the woman he spent the night with show up at his sister’s wedding on the arm of his brother, he knows he should keep his distance. But because of the night they set fire to the sheets in his hotel room, he can’t resist the urge to be close to her–nor can he resist the temptation to have her back in his bed. ~ Goodreads


My thoughts: This was a freebie novella on Amazon and pretty darn good. Roarke came on a tad too aggressively for my tastes but when you’re a single mom turning 30 – why not go for a night of passion with a really smart, hot dude? Happy birthday Celeste! lol

Despite their connection and hot night of smexin – Celeste panics and bolts the next morning but they meet up again after she agrees to be the fake girlfriend at a family wedding for a friend of hers, Derrick. Of course drama ensues when it’s revealed that Derrick is the brother of Roarke.

Drama ensues, of course, but I really liked how it all turns out – even with Derrick. As with most novellas, I wished for a little more. Especially when it came to Roarke and Celeste's daughter. They’re both science geeks and I think it would have been cute to see their relationship blossom instead of being told. Even so there was a nice resolution and epilogue.

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TO SAVE HER TWIN SISTER SHE MUST SWITCH PLACES WITH HER...

When her long lost sister--a prostitute--is won in a card game by a brutal drug cartel, Zelda knows what she has to do: take her place. Save her. Focus on infiltrating the shadowy group on behalf of the Associates, and try not to think about why she left the spying game years ago. She’s slept with dangerous criminals before; she can do it again.

Hugo Martinez is one of South America’s most lethal and wanted men, a legendary mercenary living on a windswept mountain. Even at the height of the war he wasn’t in the habit of taking women captive, but the American whore has seen his face. And he and the orphan boy need a cook. He shouldn’t want this woman, but there’s something so unusual about her…

Little by little, Zelda finds herself falling for her captor…but is he the killer she’s been hunting all these years? ~ Goodreads


My thoughts: It took me a little while to find my groove with this book. I kept setting it aside. Zelda, an Associates agent, while on and undercover mission to save her sister, keeps bringing up the “Friar Hovde” incident and “Kabakas” I know it was meant to refer to traumatic and pivotal moments in Zelda’s past but to me –I got frustrated. Whenever an author doesn’t tell me what the incident is – for most of the book - I stop caring at a certain point.

But once I committed myself to reading this book and Zelda connects with Hugo – a very brooding, possibly dangerous, hero things just take right off.

I loved Hugo. LOVED. I know he’s supposed to be all dangerous and scary but the awkward kindness he shows Paolo, an orphan boy he cares for, and the tenderness he exhibits whenever he is with Zelda (even if she doesn’t know how to handle that tenderness) made me swoon. He was not at all what I expected.

“She was at home with hard men, cold men. Men who paid her, maybe even hurt her. She was steel for such men. But tenderness melted her. Made her alive.”

I found him to be less of a dangerous hero and more of a lonely one who just cut himself off because it hurts less than losing the ones you love.

Zelda and Hugo make a wonderful team. Both scarred and broken but longing for love and connection. I was happy to see them both get what they wanted and needed from each other without changing who they were.

This is the 4th book in Crane’s Associates series and things got real messy with the gang in this one. Choices had to made – allegiances declared and not everyone came out the winner. Good stuff! I highly recommend this series.