Rating: 3.5 stars
CBR15 Bingo: Bodies Bodies (self-esteem issues, eating disorder)
15-word review: International supermodel Gia has an eating disorder, but eats when restaurant owner Bennet feeds her.
Longer review: Gia Gallo is used to travelling in her job as a globe-trotting fashion model. Recently, she struggles with the fact that she doesn't fit into the teeny tiny sizes of the clothes she's supposed to model, and she's not really sure if she's not outgrown the whole industry, both in body size and motivation-wise. Having never been in anything outside of the fashion world, however, she doesn't really feel like she would be qualified for anything else if she were to retire. The pressures of her job are causing her to have massively disordered eating. Deep down she knows it's a problem, but she doesn't really want to own up to it, and she's certainly not ready for anyone else to find out, especially not her best friends.
One of those best friends, Wendy, is getting married in Florida in six days. Gia has Wendy's late mother's wedding dress and needs to get to Florida in time to have the dress altered before the ceremony. Unfortunately, she's stuck in New York in a snowstorm, and no matter how much she threatens or pleads with airline staff, is she getting out of there by air. It just so happens that the best man for the wedding, restaurant owner and chef Bennett Buchanan is also stuck in the city, with the wedding rings, and he gets the last rental car but offers to let her come along for the road trip if she dials down her fashion diva behaviour.
Because the weather is decidedly not on their side, Bennett and Gia decide to drive all the way to Florida. They fight their obvious attraction for one another, because Gia is only interested in a short-term fling, while Bennett only doesn't do casual hook-ups. Their differing outlook on relationships doesn't keep them from jumping one another for too long, though. As their road trip progresses and they get to know each other better, it also becomes very obvious to Bennet that Gia has an eating disorder, but she never seems to refuse food as long as he's the one cooking it for her. He tries to encourage her to open up to her friends about her troubles, while she helps him get more comfortable with his past and his relationship with his family.
This is the third and final of the Bridesmaids Behaving Badly series, and by the end of it, all three friends introduced over the course of the series end up married. I enjoy Holiday's books, although none of them have impressed me enough to rate five stars yet. She's not on the 'buy at full price', and certainly not on the extremely rare 'buy in pre-order as soon as it becomes available' list, but I will keep picking up her book on sale.
Judging a book by its cover: This cover is perfectly fine, but since Gia has her hair dyed for the majority of the book, I really think the cover model's hair should have reflected that. I'm sure it's possible to do that sort of thing in editing after the photo is taken, so the model wouldn't even have had to dye her hair for real.
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