Grade: A

Nicodemus Lightfoot. Mmmm-mmm-mmm… Now there’s a man. He’s smart, charming, handsome, and rich. Damn, but I love me these Jayne Ann Krentz heroes. They’re all just so… intense and scrumptious. Harry Trevelyan is still my favorite JAK hero (his father’s family? Carny folk!), but I’m also very fond of Nick because he’s a different kind of JAK hero. He doesn’t have major revenge issues like Joel Blackstone, is not a social retard like Sam Stark, nor is he consumed by bitterness for what his father’s family did to his parents like Luke Gilchrist (mmm… Luke Gilchrist). Aside from his father marrying his ex-wife who had accused him of rape, which caused him to be kicked out of his family, Nick Lightfoot is actually pretty damn normal. His counterpart, Phila Fox, is a different kind of JAK heroine as well. Sure, she’s still stubborn, opposes the hero at every turn, and completely asexual before the hero comes along, but Phila is different because she was a foster kid. This means she never had to work sixty hours a week to support a sibling because their parents died in a car accident or an eco-terrorist mission (ETA: oh wait, her parents DID die in an eco-terrorist mission, but no siblings), nor is she some hippy living in some hippy, backwater town as a manager of some cozy inn that employs a bunch of wacky characters. In fact, Phila is pretty tough. She’s not all New Age-y and drinks only Darjeeling tea; she’s even had a life outside of books. She’s actually street-smart. She’s tough, man.

Philadelphia Fox was a foster kid who had to get by on her smarts. With her best friend Chrissie, she’s had first hand experience on what it’s like to be ignored by the system when you’re being molested by your foster parent’s brother and you have to bash his brains in with a lamp to keep him from raping you. Because of this, she grows up to be naturally suspicious, a little wary of large men, and becomes a social worker so that she can help keep such incidents from happening to other kids. When one of her cases ends up being molested and abused by her foster parent, but she is unable to find enough evidence against him to be able to yank the kids out of the home, Phila relies on her own wits and does the unthinkable. She puts herself in a position that will make it look like the foster parent is being violent against her, plants drugs on him, gets the man arrested, and commits perjury on the witness stand against him, so that he has to go to prison and the kids will be taken out of his home. Because of this, Phila no longer feels she can do her job because she has lost her objectivity, so she quits her position at the county. Around the same time, her reckless party-girl best friend Chrissie dies in a car accident, and Phila suspects that her new-found family might have something to do with it. When Nicodemus Lightfoot shows up, starts sniffing around her, and offers her money for the company stock that Chrissie had left her in her will, Phila gets more suspicious. When Nick extends to her an invitation to check out the family compound herself, Phila jumps at the opportunity, so that she can investigate and ask questions about the events that led up to Chrissie’s death.

If Phila was a foster kid, Nicodemus Lightfoot was the golden son of the Castleton and Lightfoot families, one of the wealthiest and most prestigious in the Pacific Northwest. He was the CEO of C&L, made the company a lot of money, and even married a woman handpicked by Eleanor Castleton, the matriarch of C&L. After an incident which leads his ex-wife Hilary to accuse him of rape, Nick refuses to defend himself to such outrageous allegations, expects his father to back him up, but when he doesn’t, Nick leaves in disgust, and starts up his own consulting business, which also makes him a lot of money. Even though he could have completely turned his back on his families, Nick instead watches from the sidelines, unable to do anything even as he suspects that someone in the company is setting it up for a major fall. When the opportunity to redeem himself comes in the form of Eleanor Castleton asking him to retrieve the shares that Chrissie Masters, her dead husband’s dead illegitimate daughter, bequeathed to one Philadelphia Fox, Nick pounces on it, and begins to formulate a plan. If he could somehow get his hands on Phila’s shares, add it to his own shares, and get his father to vote with him at the next annual shareholder’s meeting of the company, he could become the CEO again and save the company from destruction. This way, he could become the hero, redeem himself in his father’s eyes, and maybe have a parade thrown in his honor.

I’m kidding about the parade, but it would have been awesome.

Man, I love the drama of this JAK book. There’s the romance that inevitably develops between Phila and Nick, but there are interesting side characters in this story, too. There’s Nick’s dad (whose name I can’t remember at the moment, but I’m too lazy to look), who suspects that Nick may not have done what Hilary accuses him of doing, but was disappointed when Nick refuses to defend himself and leaves the family without a word of protest. There’s Eleanor Castleton, the matriarch of the family, who was married to man who cheated on her for years, and on the surface may look like the ultimate Ice Queen, but buries a seething anger underneath as evidenced by her obsession with carnivorous plants. There’s Hilary, Nick’s ex-wife, who is the current CEO of C&L, the wife of Nick’s father, and has hidden agendas of her own. There’s Darren Castleton, the charming, handsome son of Eleanor, and an aspiring governor of Washington; he is married to Victoria, a bitter, suspicious woman, who thinks Hilary may have slept with Darren, as well as Burke, Darren’s dead father. Every single member of this family hated Chrissie Masters, Phila’s dead friend, because she brought to the surface all the dirty little secrets that the family kept hidden for years, and knew which buttons to push, which means every single of one of them has a motive for murder.

While Phila and Nick’s romance is actually just secondary to the C&L drama, but that’s okay, because what we do get is pretty hot. Phila is very wary of Nick at first, especially since he’s a big dude and she’s not very fond of big dudes, but Nick is very patient with her, and slowly thaws her out. Because of Phila’s phobia with big dudes, she’s unable to have sex with the man on top, so she and Nick get pretty creative, and boy, do they ever. This courtship of theirs is very cat-and-mouse, with Nick as a very dangerous tiger and Phila as a cute little prairie mouse. They have sex, they have fun, and most importantly, they talk. I think this is what I like best about JAK couplings. There are hardly ever stupid, trite misunderstandings because the two leads actually talk things out. Sure, sometimes they talk things to death, but I would rather have that than have the two leads yell and scream at each other because they forgot to talk about important things like their names or if they have children or that they were once married to the other person’s dead twin or some shit like that.

The only thing that really bugs me about this book is a couple of things that Phila does later on that would probably qualify her for the Worst Girlfriend Ever award. Seriously, this broad does some stuff that makes me wonder if she really cares about Nick or if she’s just fucking with him. SPOILER: 1) She refuses to give Nick her shares and instead surrenders them to the Castletons even though she knew that there was a chance that they would vote for Hilary as CEO and fuck everyone over, because she thought it was time that Nick trusted that his father and everyone else would do the right thing and back him instead of Hilary (stupid broad! For a supposedly “smart chick”, you’re pretty dumb. Why on earth would you trust that they would do the right thing when they’ve made it VERY clear that they don’t trust Nick? How dare you put his family’s livelihood on the line for your stupid, self-righteous bullshit?); 2) When Nick wins the CEO spot and is accepted back into the fold, she tells him that he should sell his business to Hilary, so she doesn’t go away empty-handed. WHAT? The woman tried to ruin C&L and everyone in the family, you dingbat! If I were Nick, I would have kicked her in the teeth and left her ass hanging high and dry. Lastly, Phila carries a gun because the psycho she put away vowed to come after her, but she refuses to learn how to use the gun, and Nick had to force some classes on her. Also, she insults Nick and his family at every turn and we’re supposed to think that she’s just a “take no prisoners” kind of broad and respect her for it, instead of slapping her upside the head for being a rude, uncouth bitch. But you know what? I still kind of like her. She’s just the way she is because she had a hard life. I respect that she didn’t act as a victim and wait around for some dude to rescue her. Good on ya, Phila! Turn it down a notch, though, ‘cause you’re in danger of being unlikeable.

Anyway, this book is a lot of fun to read. There’s hot sex, melodrama, adventure, and intrigue. Man, trust JAK to bring it where it counts. I have already read this book a few times in the past and would probably read it again in the future. Nick is hot, Phila’s okay, and the family is nuts, but they give good drama. I sooo want to be JAK when I grow up. She’s awesome! And I bet she’s rich, too, because HQN has been re-releasing her old Harlequin backlists. JAK, can I have some money? No, seriously. I’ve got rent to pay.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 16th, 2005 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Books, Grade: A, Romance: Contempo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.