Tuesday, January 25, 2022

Southern Bombshell (North Carolina Highlands #5) by Jessica Peterson

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The Wedding Planner’s Rulebook:
Keep the bride happy.
Keep the wedding party out of trouble.
Never let anyone know you’ve been in love with the groom for years.

I lived by these rules. Until Nate Kingsley.


The Capulets and Montagues have nothing on the Beauregards and Kingsleys. Our families have feuded for centuries, and Nate was always forbidden—which made fooling around with him that much more delicious. But then I fell for him, and he fell off the face of the earth, ghosting me without so much as a goodbye.

Fast-forward two years: as an expert in romance, I’m a wedding planner to the rich and famous. I never expected Nate to show up at my office, least of all with a shiny new fiancée on his arm. She’s got money to burn, and she wants me to plan the most extravagant wedding of my career.

It’s a make-or-break moment for my business. I convince myself I can do Nate’s wedding and keep my feelings for him in check, even if he does look good.

Really, really good.

But when the secrets we buried years ago come to light, what kept us apart suddenly binds us together. Even if my heart belongs to Nate, and his belongs to me, he belongs to someone else. And that’s a rule we absolutely cannot break.

Source: ARC provided in exchange for an honest review


Now that all those pesky older brothers are out of the way, it's Milly's time to shine! She's always just been kind of on the periphery, quietly doing her own thing while her brothers have been getting all the attention. So no one would know that Milly was quietly in love with Nate Kingsley, quietly had a steamy fling with him, and then quietly got her heart broken into a million pieces when Nate broke up with her. Milly quietly nursed her broken heart and threw herself into her work as a wedding planner, putting Nate firmly in the rear view mirror. That is until he walks into her office with his fiancée, ready to hire her as their wedding planner. Awkward doesn't even cut it. Milly, who's meticulously cultivated a poised, organized professional persona over the years is slightly thrown off her game. However, she'll set aside her personal feelings and do the job.



Nate still feels bad about walking out on Milly two years ago. Worse because he never revealed the reason why. He'll always regret how he did it but not why he did it. But they've since moved on and by all accounts, they both seem happy. Sure, having her plan his wedding to Reece will be weird as all get out but they can both be adults about this. 

It's apparent that though Reece and Nate love each other, they're missing the sizzling chemistry that Nate and Milly had. And as I worried about the potential of the story moving towards a cheating storyline, Nate and Reece simply drift apart leaving Milly and Nate to pick up from where they left off, like none of the preceding two years ever happened. They still need to address the circumstances of their breakup but they can put that off while they ... reconnect.



Nate and Milly create a lot of heat and intensity which is great when you're expecting that kind of drama in a romance. I liked that they're both a few years older, also wiser as they've had time to grow up. While Milly's been thriving at work with her borthers at the family's resort, Nate's been doing the same albeit without the supportive atmosphere that Milly's privileged to have. Nate's dad is a gambler and a walking nightmare. Everything he touches turns to trash and Nate does what he can to keep him away from the business aspect of their whiskey distillery. He also gets protective of Milly, not wanting her to be in the cross hairs of his ongoing fight with his father. Milly has enough to deal with what with her brothers' overprotectiveness and her own troubles with finding joy in her work again - something we all experience at some point or other - and it takes rekindling things with Nate again and honest conversations with him to reconsider what brings her joy. I liked this second chance love story. It's obvious these two were made for each other and I loved their moments together. Nate's pretty much the whole package and Milly is pretty terrific herself. 

I do have to address a couple of details. One of them is during Nate's point of view when he's recalling his family dynamics and he mentions that his mother passed away, and in parentheses it's mentioned from what disease she died of. Honestly, it was jarring and caught me off guard and was incredibly triggering. It took me out of the moment and I was upset to come across it, even more so when that specific detail ended up not having any bearing on the rest of the story. If it had nothing to do with the plotline as a whole then I don't understand why it had to be included. Then this "feud" between the Beauregards and the Kingsleys. The blurb compares it to Romeo and Juliet levels of rivalry but there wasn't enough in there to give said feud any weight or presence in the story. All I could get was Nate's dad's jealousy of the Beauregards' success, and that the feud started decades back, and I wish there'd been something more tangible and recent perhaps to make the feud seem insurmountable, therefore making Nate and Milly's reunion scandalous. 

I liked Southern Bombshell even if those couple of details bothered me. There's a lovely epilogue at the end from another family member we haven't heard from before and it's actually a fitting end to the series on the Beauregards, filled with all the happily ever afters for everyone in this big, loud, protective, unconditional loving family.

~ Bel

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Edit 1/27/21  -- CW for mention of brain cancer (Nate's mom); also mention of CTE (Beauregards' dad who was a NFL player; Beau has also been diagnosed with it and this was first mentioned in Southern Southern Seducer book 1 of the series); gambling problems (Nate's dad, and Nate's brother but his brother has recovered)

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