Review: Secrets of the Heart by Jannifer Hoffman

Hero: Hunter Douglas
Heroine: Nicole Anderson
Grade: 4 out of 5

Nicole Anderson owns a successful costume design business, has a wealth of small town friends and sleeps in a lonely bed haunted by demons from the past. She’s convinced herself her life is exactly the way she wants it and has shot down every marriageable man within a fifty-mile radius.

When Hunter Douglas is assigned the task of delivering a deceased friend’s children to their aunt, he must first convince the belligerent Nicole Anderson that she actually had a sister. Though forced to take his two charges to Minnesota, Hunter fully intents to persuade Ms. Anderson to allow the children to return to New York with him without sharing his own little secret. The last thing he wants to do is fall in love with a woman who lives in a small Midwest town with neighbors who seem to know every move he makes.

As the heat index between Nicole and Hunter rises, a bizarre puzzle begins to unfold involving false birth certificates, a stolen suitcase, odd pictures, an elusive stalker, and a grandfather’s legacy that could turn deadly.

It’s been a couple of days since I finished this story and I’m still trying to gather my thoughts on exactly how I felt about reading this book. I mean, there’s no doubt that I enjoyed this story but there were a few times when reading that I just wanted to throw my hands up in the air and say, “I give up!” because there is so much going on in this story. A whole lot of things that you have to keep in mind while reading this story.

Okay, so Hunter Douglas was put in charge of delivering Brenda Casey’s children to her half sister in Minnesota after Brenda dies. Hunter knows Brenda because he’s a PI and she hired him to find her biological father about 7 years ago. So Brenda’s dead and she’s left behind two kids, Shanna and Kyle. Brenda hasn’t lived a very straight and narrow kind of life, she was a little loosy goosy and she had a very brief affair with Hunter after he found her father for her and that information gets Hunter into a lot of trouble with Nicole.

Now Nicole is the half sister that Brenda never knew she had. She found out about her biological father and found out about her sister and brother. The intricacies of the whole plot and Brenda’s plan was executed well in this story and I enjoyed watching everything unfold. There’s a lot going on in this story with Nicole finding out she’s got a long lost sister that is dead and she’s the primary caretaker of two small children that are her blood relatives.

It’s a whole lot to find out that your Dad might have possibly had an affair while he was still married to your mother, especially when you find out about your dad’s other family after he’s already gone and dead and Nicole handled it pretty well. She reacted as any normal person would react to having your entire world collapse around you and I ended up really liking her. The problem with Nicole’s character for me, was that in the beginning of the story when we first meet Nicole, I couldn’t really see what was so special about her. My first impression of Nicole was that she was forgettable. She was one of those heroines that serves her purpose in this story but I’m probably going to forget everything about her by next week…but as the story progressed, so did my appreciation of Nicole Anderson.

Do you guys remember this email story:

Women are like apples on trees. The best ones are at the top of the tree. Most men don’t want to reach for the good ones because they are afraid of falling and getting hurt. Instead, they sometimes take the apples from the ground that aren’t as good, but easy. The apples at the top think something is wrong with them, when in reality, they’re amazing. They just have to wait for the right man to come along, the one who is brave enough to climb all the way to the top of the tree.

Nicole was one of the apples at the top of the tree, at first glance you wouldn’t see how amazing she is but the more you got to know her, the more you got….her. She was great with the kids and she was good with Hunter. She found out a whole lot about herself that she never knew and she faced down her demons with Hunter’s help and I just found her character to be a delight.

Hunter, on the other hand, I loved immediately. How can you not love a man who fell in love with two kids that were thrown into his lap and wanted to do right by them? Hunter was a hero who got under my skin (in a good way) right from the jump. I loved his relationship with the people around. The relationship he formed with Shanna and Kyle was what really sealed his fate as my favorite character of the entire story, I just got all gooey inside for him because he loved those kids and he was going to give them the kind of home they should’ve had all along if Nicole didn’t take them. He wanted those kids and I heart him for that. Hunter’s relationship with his family and with his assistant made him that much more awesome. I loved reading his conversations with Virgil and Quint and I just really enjoyed him. I loved how gentle he was with Nicole and I loved his role in helping her live again. There were times aplenty in the book where I was thinking, AWWWWWWW after he did something sweet and I just really, really heart him. My one complaint with him was, Hunter, Hunter, Hunter….why oh why did you ever think it was a good idea to keep your big secret from Nicole? He took his sweet ol’ time telling her about the secret that when she finally found out about it, I was sooooo mad at him. I wanted to smack him upside his head but alls well that ends well and this story ended well.

As a whole, the story was enjoyable but there were a lot going on, a lot that you had to keep up with and then there was the whole coincidence thing with Billy that I could’ve done without because it reeked of overkill but even with all of that stuff going on, I enjoyed this book and cannot wait to finish this series out, Quint’s story here I come. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone looking for a great story that you can sink your teeth into and figure out. This was a good one.

This book is available from Resplendence. You can buy it here in e-format.

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