Cathy Gillen Thacker

The Christmas letters of the title barely feature here, they’re just the kicking off point rather than integrated throughout the story, which was a little disappointing as I’d hoped they would add something different to the story.

Bess and Jack are longtime friends, he’s a widower with three daughters, finally ready to move on romantically only for whatever reason he doesn’t come right out and tell Bess she’s the one he wants to move on with, so Bess who’s been in love with him forever, believes the best she can get with him is a no strings affair until Christmas.

That no strings affair led to this being much heavier on sex scenes than I generally expect in Harlequin’s Special Edition books, the frequency here was more on par with what the old Blaze line of novels used to be. I don’t mind explicit sex scenes, but I did feel like at least some of those pages would have been better used to develop the emotional side of their relationship instead, for so-called friends these two were terrible at communicating with one another, particularly towards the end. Plus, an overabundance of sex scenes becomes tricky when one of the characters is a single parent, between spending his days as a surgeon and his nights at Bess’s having sex, at a certain point I started to wonder if Jack spent more than ten minutes a day with his girls. There’s something appealing about a good, attentive dad, not so much a dad consistently pawning the kids off on their nanny.… (meer)