Rating: 4 stars
Thank you to Janine Amesta and Tule Publishing for this ARC. My opinions are my own.
This is the second book in the Love is in the Air series, but this book can be read as a standalone as well. If you prefer to start at the beginning, the first one is Love at First Flight (which I literally, just NOW, as I was writing this, realised is a pun on "love at first sight". Now I feel stupid.)
Naomi Moreno wants to help her stubborn and independent older sister contribute to the family business, High Desert Tours, but struggles to get her sister to listen and take her seriously. She feels guilty for the tight financial situation the family is in, since she saw her father get persuaded to poor decisions and investments via YouTube influencers, ending with the business deeply in debt when he suddenly and unexpectedly passed away. She's sure that their hot air balloon company could be the perfect fit for certain couples looking for an unusual wedding venue, and her sister Selah reluctantly agrees to give her a chance, if she can work out a pricing proposal and find some interested customers.
Boone Reyes has lived an itinerant life and had to do some shady things in the past to stay alive, thanks to his unscrupulous con man father. He's rarely stayed in one place for very long. The last few years, working for the Moreno family, is the exception, and he's hoping he might be able to find additional work as a rock climbing instructor. He spends his days trying to charm and impress Naomi, the only woman in the Moreno family who refuses to warm up to him.
To have a chance to land a job as a rock climbing instructor, Boone needs to prove that he can actually properly instruct someone, not just solo climb. He makes a deal with Naomi that if she will let him teach her rock climbing, he'll help her find clients who want to get married in a hot air balloon. With a con artist father, Boone knows when to turn on the charm and be persuasive (one of the reasons Naomi distrusts him and thinks he has a hidden agenda) and he would much rather use his powers of persuasion for good, than for tricking people.
It turns out that the way to Naomi's heart is honesty and vulnerability. By sharing information about himself and his life, even when some of the details are less than rosy, Boone gradually wins Naomi's trust. There's been an attraction between them pretty much since Boone was hired, but Naomi has refused to acknowledge how much she likes him, because she's worried about falling into the same traps that her father did. When she discovers that Boone can be truthful, even when the stories he tells are sometimes rather embarrassing, she quickly warms up to him.
Complicating matters massively for our hero, Boone's father is recently out of jail, and insists on coming to crash with his son. Despite his years in prison, Boone's dad is showing absolutely no signs of wanting to become a better person and turn over a new leaf, no, he's already looking for his next score, and the Moreno women look like the perfect marks in his next scheme. Thankfully, while Naomi's mother may be too friendly and trusting, especially to anyone related to Boone, she and her sisters have learned the hard way that they need to be vigilant and do their best to drive him off. Unfortunately, for a while at least, Boone's father manages to persuade Naomi that his son has been working a long con on them, and tries to sabotage everything Boone has managed to build with Naomi and the other Morenos. Can Boone convince the prickly Naomi that he's not a fraud and a scammer, like his deadbeat dad, or will their romance die before it's even had a chance to properly begin?
15th of September to 15th of October is Hispanic Heritage month in the USA, and reading and promoting a book by a Latina author seems like a good way to start this month. I hadn't really heard of Janine Amesta before I was lucky enough to get an ARC for her previous book, but now that I have, I was actively on the look-out for a chance to read this book before it was officially released, and I am so happy I was granted another ARC. While this book works fine as a standalone, some of the underlying tensions and issues were established in the first book, and the family dynamics of the Moreno women, who are all processing their grief in different ways feel richer and more established if you've read eldest sister Selah's book first.
A lot of romance heroes nowadays are likened to golden retrievers, but as my friend Rochelle pointed out in her review, Boone is clearly a stray cat who shows up on your doorstep, begging for some food and affection, and then just refuses to leave again, once he's been fed that first time. Naomi's reasons for distrusting and being sceptical of Boone and his motives are well established and perfectly understandable. She reads a lot of romance, and is worried that Boone is a George Wickham, all handsomeness, charm and glib words on the surface hiding a scheming, self-serving and unscrupulous personality. As the reader discovers, had Boone fallen in with his father's plans and become as big a con artist as him, Naomi would be absolutely right about him. But Boone doesn't want to decieve and trick people, he wants to be a good person with a place to belong, even though he doesn't really believe he's deserving of anything positive because of his past misdeeds, helping his father (the only stable adult in his life).
Boone works hard for the Morenos, lives in a trailer and tries to get extra work as a rock climbing instructor. He's been pining for Naomi for years, and while it takes him a while to realise just how irredeemable his father actually is, and unfortunately for Boone, he doesn't really care about anything but himself, it takes him quite a while to get over his father's gaslighting and have a proper confrontation with him. He believes himself to be unworthy of the love of Naomi, her mother and sisters, and doesn't realise that while Naomi is initially fooled by Boone's dad, because of her many insecurities, the rest of the Moreno family are firmly in his corner, and feel that his actions while working for them has proven that he's a good man. It takes Naomi a bit longer to accept the truth, but once she does, and realises she's been unfairly judging him and hurt him in the process, she works her hardest to prove to him that he really does have a home with her.
Both of Amesta's books that I've read so far are about ordinary, hard-working people just wanting to make the best of their world. There are no movie stars, no celebrities, no billionaires here. They have everyday problems and everyday lives, and are just nice to spend time with on the page. I'm very much looking forward to reading about the youngest Moreno sister's romance in the third book of this trilogy.
Judging a book by its cover:
It's a very sweet cover and I like the wedding decorated hot air balloon in the background, but Naomi dyes her hair pink early on in this book, and is still described with pink hair when she actually gets married. So I would have been happier if she had pink hair in the cover image. It's a minor niggle, but I have it nevertheless.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read.
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