Review & Excerpt – Make It Real by Nan Reinhardt
Synopsis
They were only faking it….
A landscape designer for his family’s construction firm, Joe Walker, is nearing completion on one of the most important projects of his career—gardens for spec homes that if they wow, Walker Construction will survive. When a freak accident sidelines him with a broken leg, the firm hires a competitor. Her ideas are radically different, but his stalker ex arrives to play nurse, and Joe needs more than gardening help.
After six-years working in English manor gardens, horticulturist Kara Sudbury returns to River’s Edge to help in her grandparents’ struggling garden center. She’s thrilled when Jackson Walker hires her to execute his injured cousin’s designs. Ignoring Joe is difficult because he’s as sexy now as he was in high school and even more stubborn. But when Joe asks Kara to play the role of girlfriend, they strike a deal that will help Joe handle his tenacious ex and put Sudbury’s Nursery back in the black. Kara’s up for the subterfuge…for a price, but then the pretense feels real, and Kara is reminded that every rose has its thorns.
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Review
This small-town romance brings together two unlikely characters to discover love. But I don’t think they are as unlikely as you might think.
Joe & Kara are adorable! I really loved both of these characters, and they found a way to turn a fake relationship into something real. It really should be no surprise that they would have a lot in common since they both enjoyed landscape architecture. Joe might have been a little controlling and OCD when it came to his designs, but he was smart enough to realize that maybe Kara’s input would make things much better.
I did chuckle at how they met over chickens and an errant fox. The initial outcome was not good, between the broken leg and the allergic reaction to poison ivy, but that helped set up their fake relationship when the woman Joe dated a few times came in with guns blazing and claimed Joe for her own.
There are a few really sad moments, but the happiness outweighs those times. Plus, those moments lead to a future for this couple in more ways than one.
I enjoy all of the stories set in this small town, and I look forward to reading more about River’s Edge.
We give this book 5 paws up.
Excerpt
The gun went off, the woman screeched, and Joe let out a loud oof, then a groan of pain. He released the gun and lay still, his head, face, neck, and bare chest stinging from the blackberry nettles and his left leg feeling very weird. Scout barked and ran up to him, licking Joe’s cheek and panting dog breath all over him.
“Did you shoot yourself?” The woman was there, too, stepping carefully through the brush until she was about a foot from him, her smooth, tanned legs only inches from his head. “Oh my God!” When he opened one eye and looked up at her, her face, which was vaguely familiar, had turned from angry to ashen and horrified. “Your leg!”
The sting of the blackberry thorns had somehow kept him from noticing what was now agonizing pain in his left shin. He started to turn over, but she stooped down and put a dirty gloved hand on his shoulder. “No, don’t move.”
“My face,” he managed, but it was hard to even speak because of the brambles sticking him everywhere, and shit! Was that poison ivy under his cheek? Inanely, his mind went to a couplet, his cousin Jack had taught him and Cam and Eli years ago—leaves of three, let it be; leaves of five, let it thrive. His glasses were gone, and his eye was blurry, but yep, that was three leaves. No. No. No. “I gotta . . . gotta get up,” he mumbled. “Poison ivy.”
The woman held him in place. “That’s the least of your problems. Your leg is really messed up.”
He lifted his head and shoved up with his arms, bringing his upper body out of the brambles, but dropped right back down again as pain shot through his left leg, leaving him nearly breathless. He attempted to peer over his shoulder, but all he could see was his own butt in the slipping-down sleeping shorts. When he tried to move the leg, pain, more excruciating than before, shot through him.
“Stop moving, will you? Your leg is stuck on a branch sticking out of this log and I can see”—she looked down his body at his lower extremities and her pallor grew even grayer—“oh crap, I can see a bone sticking out of your shin.” She plopped down next to him, heedless of the poisonous plants covering the ground, and pulled her phone out of her shorts pocket. “I’m calling 911.”
“You just sat in poison ivy,” he ground out, lifting his head again and biting the inside of his cheek to keep from adding idiot. He was pretty sure he owed her one. But on the other hand, he also needed some help here.
“It doesn’t bother me. I never get it.” She raked her fingers through her hair as she spoke to emergency services, relating what she believed happened, making him sound like a colossal dumbass as she speculated to the dispatcher that she thought he might have shot himself.
“I didn’t shoot myself,” he said as loudly as he could, given he’d dropped his face back on the ground because even the slightest movement sent red-hot fire through his leg and up into his thigh.
“Yeah, he says he’s not shot, but his leg . . . man, it’s pretty awful. Not bleeding too badly, but there’s a sharp piece of a stick stuck in his calf and his shin’s broken for sure”—she gulped—“I can see the bone. No, no, I won’t touch it. God, no!” She looked down at him. “What’s your address?”
He moaned, his mind a blank.
“It’s on Fourth Street behind Sudbury’s Nursery. Maybe the 2900 block?” she said into her phone.
“It’s 2917,” Joe managed.
“It’s 2917,” she repeated for the dispatcher, paused to listen, then asked, “What’s your name?”
“Joe Walker.” That came out stronger, but the effort exhausted him.
“Oh, crap! Joey? Joey Walker?” She bent her head to peer down at him, and her eyes, which were an unusual golden-brown color, were huge.
About the Author
Nan Reinhardt is a USA Today bestselling author of sweet romantic fiction for Tule Publishing. Her day job is working as a freelance copyeditor and proofreader. However, writing is Nan’s first and most enduring passion. She can’t remember a time in her life when she wasn’t writing—she wrote her first romance novel at the age of ten and is still writing, but now from the viewpoint of a wiser, slightly rumpled woman in her prime. Nan lives in the Midwest with her husband of 49 years, where they split their time between a house in the city and a cottage on a lake.
