Hurts to Love You: Forbidden Hearts

by Alisha Rai

Overview

Being bad never felt so good, in the third novel in Alisha Rai’s sexy Forbidden Hearts series!

Well-behaved women don’t lust after men who love to misbehave.

Heiress Evangeline Chandler knows how to keep a secret . . . like her life-long crush on the tattooed hottie who just happens to be her big brother’s friend. She’s a Chandler, after all, and Chandlers don’t hook up with the help. Then again, they also don’t disobey their fathers and quit their respectable jobs, so good-girl rules may no longer apply.

Gabriel Hunter hides the pain of his past behind a smile, but he can’t hide his sudden attraction to his friend’s sheltered little sister. Eve is far too sweet to accept anything less than forever and there’s no chance of a future between the son of a housekeeper and the town’s resident princess.

When a wedding party forces Eve and Gabe into tight quarters, keeping their hands off each other will be as hard as keeping their clothes on. The need that draws them together is stronger than the forces that should shove them apart . . . but their sparks may not survive the explosion when long-buried secrets are finally unearthed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062566775
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	03/27/2018
Series:	Forbidden Hearts , #3
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Alisha Rai pens award-winning contemporary romances, and her novels have been named Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post, NPR, Amazon, Entertainment Weekly, Kirkus, and Cosmopolitan magazine. When she’s not writing, Alisha is traveling or tweeting. To find out more about her books or to sign up for her newsletter, visit alisharai.com.  

Editorial Reviews

02/05/2018
The only thing more romantic than a wedding is the long-awaited consummation of love between two favorite characters in a series, and the enjoyable third installment to Rai’s Forbidden Hearts contemporary series serves up both. When the formerly feuding Kane and Chandler clans reunite for a luxurious wedding between Livvy Kane and Nicholas Chandler, Eve, the youngest Chandler sibling, faces several days in the same place as her longtime crush, tattoo artist Gabe Hunter. Little does she know that he’s been secretly lusting after her for years. But as the adopted son of the Kane family’s hired help, Gabe has never felt worthy of the heiress. It’s fun to watch timid Eve come out of her shell and risk exposing her true feelings in the days leading up to the wedding. True to Rai’s style, family secrets and surprises add complexity to this strong story about how wealth and privilege can do as much to destroy happiness as to facilitate it. Agent: Steven Axelrod, Axelrod Agency. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

The only thing more romantic than a wedding is the long-awaited consummation of love between two favorite characters in a series, and the enjoyable third installment to Rai’s Forbidden Hearts contemporary series serves up both... True to Rai’s style, family secrets and surprises add complexity to this strong story about how wealth and privilege can do as much to destroy happiness as to facilitate it.” — Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

Lucy Rivers and Jeremy York narrate the final installment of a soapy family saga. Eve Chandler has always been seen as a good girl, but she longs to break free of that image. Gabe Hunter has a collection of secrets he hides behind a cheerful attitude and a carefree smile. Rivers and York excel at portraying the uncertainty of Eve and Gabe when they’re confronted with the possibility of turning long-held crushes into romance. As they discover, that uncertainty can sometimes manifest itself in regrettable ways. The narrators are less successful at depicting the story’s secondary characters. York has a tendency to make the female characters sound shrill, while Rivers struggles to vary her range enough to create substantial differences in the male characters. K.M.P. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2018 - AudioFile

Lucy Rivers and Jeremy York narrate the final installment of a soapy family saga. Eve Chandler has always been seen as a good girl, but she longs to break free of that image. Gabe Hunter has a collection of secrets he hides behind a cheerful attitude and a carefree smile. Rivers and York excel at portraying the uncertainty of Eve and Gabe when they’re confronted with the possibility of turning long-held crushes into romance. As they discover, that uncertainty can sometimes manifest itself in regrettable ways. The narrators are less successful at depicting the story’s secondary characters. York has a tendency to make the female characters sound shrill, while Rivers struggles to vary her range enough to create substantial differences in the male characters. K.M.P. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2018 - AudioFile

2018-02-20
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.

Kirkus Reviews