Kissing Under the Mistletoe
Marina Adair’s Kissing Under the Mistletoe (310 pages,
$12.95, Montlake Romance) is the first in her series of Napa Valley
romances. While certain staples of
romance description, especially moments of sexual intensity that only manage to
tease the principle characters, leave me unimpressed, Adair has a way of
creating winning characters and putting them in very amusing, if not always
believable, situations.
In this novel, Regan
Martin, a talented wine expert, has come to Napa to fill an important job
vacancy. When she arrives,
however, she finds she has stepped on the toes of the most powerful local wine
families, and her job disappears before her eyes.
The family, the DeLucas,
have a longstanding tradition of power-broking in Napa. Now they are a younger generation—four
brothers and a single sister. It
seems that Regan was having an affair with the sister’s husband. Regan didn’t know about her, Abigail,
and when she did discover that the boyfriend was married, she was in the
process of being fleeced by him, too.
Regan has come out of this affair with a daughter and a whole family of
enemies.
The oldest brother, Gabe,
is the one who is commissioned to deal with Regan. And while he has blackballed her from getting a decent job in
any winery in the country, he nevertheless finds her breathtakingly attractive
when confronted with her face to face.
Regan feels exactly the same about him, and the two characters spend
hundreds of pages trying not to get into each other’s pants—or getting into
them and then figuring out how to get beyond that lapse.
While this is going on, Adair
creates a whole assortment of other characters in her Napa setting, and she
does a wonderful job with characters' descriptions, sometimes at the level of
caricature but often with a deft hand at the revealing detail or telling
secret.
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