CHASING CHRISTMAS EVE by Jill Shalvis: Review & Excerpt

Chasing Christmas Eve by Jill Shalvis
Series: Heartbreaker Bay #4
Published by Avon Books
Publication Date: September 26th 2017
Genres: Contemporary Romance
Pages: 384
Source: Publisher
Format: eARC
Goodreads
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Disclaimer: I voluntarily reviewed a copy of this book. All opinions stated are solely mine.

Meet cute…
Run for the hills—temporarily. That’s Colbie Albright’s plan when she flees New York for San Francisco. Wrangling her crazy family by day and writing a bestselling YA fantasy series by night has taken its toll. In short, Colbie’s so over it that she’s under it. She’s also under the waters of a historic San Francisco fountain within an hour of arrival. Fortunately, the guy who fishes Colbie out has her looking forward to Christmas among strangers. But she’s pretty sure Spencer Baldwin won’t be a stranger for long.

Make merry…
Spence’s commitment to hiding from the Ghosts of Relationships Past means he doesn’t have to worry about the powerful—okay, crazy hot chemistry—he’s got with Colbie. Just because she can laugh at anything, especially herself… just because she’s gorgeous and a great listener just because she gets Spence immediately doesn’t mean he won’t be able to let Colbie go. Does it?

and hope for a miracle.
Now the clock’s ticking for Colbie and Spence: Two weeks to cut loose. Two weeks to fall hard. Two weeks to figure out how to make this Christmas last a lifetime. 

 

Review

Every story I have read in this series has left me highly entertained and charmed by both the delightful story and the fun characters and this story is no different. CHASING CHRISTMAS EVE is the perfectly lighthearted and feel good romance that will put you in an anticipatory mood for the coming holiday season. I enjoyed it so much and found myself in tears of mirth a lot of times. If you need a book to make you laugh, this is the perfect book to read!

Colbie Albright has spent most of her adult years taking care of her family and the added pressure from her career isn’t helping any, so walking away from all of it for a bit is the only way to relieve the pressure, never mind that she has a looming deadline on a book she has not even written yet. What she planned to be a getaway to some sunny climate became a trip to San Francisco where her solo plans get scuttled, thanks to an unruly canine. But the replacement plan isn’t so bad after all because she gets to spend time with Spence Baldwin and the rest of his crew and hopefully get her creative juices flowing again.

Spence has achieved a lot of success at his age, but the one thing that has eluded his mastery is relationships, because of his tendency to get buried in his work to the exclusion of everything else, so he makes do with short-term arrangements. And Colbie is the perfect candidate for because they are both interested in the here and now, with no strings attached. But they underestimate what they could become to each other, beyond the hot chemistry they shared from their first meeting.

Spence and Colbie are kindred spirits because they can easily lose sight of everything when they are focused on their projects and they get each other in that sense, but they also make each other want to take a breather from work to enjoy spending time together and with their friends. Spence finds his obsession with his work being tempered around Colbie and some shared downtime revives the creative juices for both of them. But can they walk away from each other and their feelings after two weeks? How can they make two weeks into forever when they live at opposite ends of the country and have so many commitments?

As usual, the dialogue was enjoyable, as was the interplay among the friends. The best thing about Ms. Shalvis’s writing is getting a romance, great dialogue, amazing interplay among secondary characters and a sense of family/community among the characters in one book. Spence was the heart of this group, giving so much to them and asking for nothing and I loved how they rallied to protect him, even though it was not necessary.

CHASING CHRISTMAS EVE is the perfect holiday story, with lots of fun and passion, little drama and lots of celebratory moments.

 

Excerpt

At the unexpected sight of Spence, Colbie startled hard. How was it that he was the one who needed glasses and yet she’d not seen him standing against the window? “No, I don’t kill a lot of people,” she said cautiously because she was wearing only a towel in front of a strange man. “But I’m happy to make an exception.”

He laughed, a rough rumble that was more than a little contagious but she controlled herself because, hello, she was once again dripping wet before the man who seemed to make her knees forget to hold her up.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said and pushed off the wall to come close.

She froze, but he held up his hands like, I come in peace, and crouched at her feet to scoop up the clothes she hadn’t realized she’d dropped.

Leggings, a long forgiving tee, and the peach silk bra-and-panty set that hadn’t gotten so much as a blink from the TSA guy.

But it got one out of Spence. He also swallowed hard as she snatched them back from him.

“Hold on,” he said and caught her arm, pulling it toward him to look at her bleeding elbow.

“Sit,” he said and gently pushed her down to a weight bench. He vanished into the bathroom and came back out with a first aid kit.

It took him less than two minutes to clean and bandage the scrape. Then, easily balanced at her side on the balls of his feet, he did the same for both her knees, which she hadn’t noticed were also scraped up.

“You must’ve hit the brick coping as you fell in the fountain,” he said and let his thumb slide over the skin just above one bandaged knee.

She shivered, and not from the cold either. “Not going to kiss it better?” she heard herself ask before biting her tongue for running away with her good sense.

She’d raised her younger twin brothers. Scrappy, roughhouse wild animals, the both of them, so there’d been plenty of injuries she’d kissed over the years.

But no one had ever kissed hers. Not surprising, since most of her injuries tended to be on the inside, where they didn’t show. Still, she was horrified she’d said anything at all. “I didn’t mean—”

She broke off, frozen like a deer in the headlights as Spence slowly lowered his head, brushing his lips over the Band-Aid on her elbow, then her knees. When he lifted his head, he pushed his glasses higher on his nose, those whiskey eyes warm and amused behind his lenses. “Better?”

Shockingly better. Since she didn’t quite trust her voice at the moment, she gave a jerky nod and took her clothes back into the bathroom. She shut the door and then leaned against it, letting out a slow, deliberate breath. Holy cow, she was out of her league. He was somehow both cute and hot, and those glasses . . .

 

 

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