LynneC’s review of Fired Waitress, Hired Mistress by Robyn Grady
Contemporary Romance published by Harlequin Presents Extra 28 June 10
I found this book frustrating because the heroine would start something, or Grady would introduce something interesting, only to never follow through on it.
The heroine, Nina, has been rich but is now working at a luxury holiday resort as a waitress. She isn’t good at her job, we’re told, but the only time we see her in action is when she defuses and takes competent charge of a situation involving a tray of dropped glasses. So she doesn’t really come across as incompetent.
We’re told that Gabe has spent all his money on one venture, and he needs to make a success of it, but that has very little to do with the story. Except it gives Nina a chance to be competent.
We’re told that Nina really wants a job in publishing. She lost her last job through downsizing, not through her fault, and when she finds one—well, that would be a spoiler.
I did enjoy the first few scenes very much. Nina is walking on the beach, gets her foot trapped in a log and the tide is coming in. Lovely. Gabe rescues her and takes her to a hut he’s hired on the island. There’s no real reason why he’s hired it, as he has a luxury bungalow at the resort, but it does give them the opportunity to get their rocks off, which they do. By then they’ve realized they know each other in the past, something the reader realized a chapter or so before they did, but that doesn’t matter. I enjoyed the way their past history was dealt with in the present. They didn’t get on very well, and they didn’t fall in love when they were children, something that tends to make me a bit uneasy when I read it in a book. As if they stopped developing in any way except physically since that moment./
So Gabe and Nina go for it.
Since there’s a no fraternizing policy, Gabe fires Nina, but she takes it fine, until she realizes a bit later that she doesn’t have much else to do and she wants to be a really, really good waitress and earn her keep. That doesn’t really work for me, because at the start of the story she’s hating being a waitress. Nepotism got her the job and she’s very guilty about that, due to her spoiled princess past.
I didn’t believe that a spoiled princess could turn into a useful member of society merely by losing her money and meeting the right man. Gabe didn’t show her the error of her ways, he bonked her senseless and then angsted about his new investment.
And she’d stopped being a spoiled princess before he arrived on the scene, anyway. Being a journalist, especially on a fashion/gossip magazine isn’t the best way to discover mature behavior, either. The spoiled pri
ncess would have worked better at “Mode” – cough – “Shimmer.”
What worked were the scenes between Gabe and Nina. They were fun together, they talked, made love and opened up to each other. What didn’t work was – everything else. The plot is paper thin, and the secondary characters almost transparent in their thinness. But this is a category romance, so fortunately, there are a lot of one to ones.
Grade: C
Summary:
There’s only one position he wants her in…
Nina Petrelle, disastrous waitress to over-privileged island holidaymakers, has just been fired by her high-handed new boss Gabe Steele aka the smoking hot stranger she’s just spent the best night of her life with.
Gabe can’t say no to Nina’s endless sun-kissed legs and her too-smart mouth that he’s just craving to keep busy! But, despite the sun, sand and scorching hot nights, his head is definite it’s only a temporary fling isn’t it?
Read an excerpt. (scroll down)
