The Trouble with Mistletoe: A Heartbreaker Bay Novel

Keane Winters walks into Willa Davis’s pet store with his aunt’s cat, seeking someone to take care of it. Willa takes care of the cat while Keane is at work. Keane and Willa strike up a relationship.

Willa knows Keane from high school when she asked him to the Sadie Hawkins dance but he never showed up at her house to pick her up. She carries that resentment with her until she finally lets him know. While he apologizes and says that he’s changed as an adult, the two waffle back and forth as to whether or not they can be in a relationship.

This book was tough to get through. The characters had little to no chemistry, and the story was thin and flat. In a good romance, the author is able to strike a balance between focusing on the relationship and dealing with an outside conflict or other matters in the characters’ lives. Jill Shalvis spent so much time depicting Willa’s physical attraction to Keane that she forgot to make them into real people. There were many holiday-themed romances published around the holidays that were much better.