THE TEMPTING, TEMPORARY ASSIGNMENT
Tired of being Miss Goody Two-shoes, Calli Thornton was ready to kick up her heels for a little adventure. She was a woman with a mission. But a sexy stranger thwarted every opportunity. It almost seemed as if this man had decided to save Calli from herself.
Rancher Gabe Griffin had been secretly hired to protect Calli. But Gabe couldn’t even keep his professional—let alone physical—distance when he moved her to his ranch for safekeeping. Heck, he couldn’t even protect himself from falling hard and fast for the blue-eyed beauty. But a love-’em-and-leave-’em man like Gabe could never give Calli the forever she deserved. Could he?
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Sexual Content - 4/5
4/5
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Violence - 2/5
2/5
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Language - 2/5
2/5
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Drugs and Alcohol - 1/5
1/5
Summary
The Unlikely Bodyguard is a slightly older, stand-alone, contemporary, category romance that’s been on my TBR list for quite some time now. I can’t recall where I first learned about it, but I’m kind of a sucker for bodyguard romances, so that might be how it landed on my list. Calli is the head chef for a designer pastry company who’s spent most of her life being pegged as a goody-two-shoes. Her boss and fellow male chefs are too overprotective toward her, so when she’s sent on vacation, instead of going to the corporate villa in Mexico, she heads to New Mexico, looking for a little danger and adventure. Calli gets a bit more than she bargained for when she goes to a couple of seedy bars, attracting the wrong kind of attention. Twice she’s rescued by bad boy rancher, Gabe Griffin, who is known to the patrons of those establishments by his old street name, Angel. When her hotel room gets ransacked and she loses most of her cash and credit cards, Gabe suggests that she spend her vacation cooking at his ranch, an offer she accepts. The two grow closer, but little does Calli know that Gabe has actually been hired in his other capacity as a private investigator by her boss to look out for her welfare, protect her recipes from corporate sabotage, and recover an office memo she accidentally took which contains information that might upset her. When she learns the truth, it may put their budding romance in jeopardy.
As a small child, Calli was abandoned on the steps of an orphanage where she was raised by nuns. As a result of her upbringing, everyone around her, particularly the men in her life, think she’s an untouchable good girl who needs protecting. Tired of her overbearing boss and male co-workers hovering, she decides to kick up her heels on vacation. However, she’s nearly attacked on two different occasions and later almost kidnapped by a guy who’s trying to get his hands on her recipe journal, but each time Gabe seems to be there to rescue her. She’s very attracted to the dashing bad boy, so when her hotel room is tossed, she accepts his offer to stay at his ranch for the remainder of her vacation. Despite the rather primitive living conditions there, she takes joy in cooking for Gabe and his ranch hands, and gradually she starts to fall for Gabe who is good at projecting a bad boy veneer but underneath has a heart of gold. But when Calli discovers that Gabe has been working for her boss all along, she can’t help being upset by his deception, and when he doesn’t seem willing to fight for their relationship or love her in return, she leaves even though it breaks her heart. Initially I wasn’t too sure about Calli, because in the opening chapters, she seemed to border on TSTL in the way that she goes into bars, flirting with dangerous-looking men just for a thrill. A part of me understood where she was coming from, but it just didn’t seem like the best way to go about shedding her good-girl image. Later we learn that she can take care of herself rather handily, which might have been nice to know earlier so that I’d have perhaps had a better impression of her actions. Once she’s with Gabe on his ranch, I liked her a lot more for her sunny personality in spite of her background, for her forgiving nature, and for the way that she loves and cares for Gabe.
Gabe’s backstory is even more heartbreaking than Calli’s, and because of it, he’s a classic damaged hero. He spent a number of years on the streets, and when his life as a cat-burglar caught up to him, his victim, who happens to be Calli’s boss, generously offered him a second chance. He wisely took it and has since turned his life around, buying a small ranch that’s slowly starting to turn a profit, but to supplement his ranching activities, he works on the side as a private investigator. When Calli’s boss asks him to look out for her and to get back the company memo that he worries will really upset Calli, Gabe feels he owes the guy and can’t reveal his true purpose to her even when he worries it may ruin the good thing they’ve been building. Gabe has never truly known love in his life and doesn’t think he’s anywhere near good enough for a woman like Calli, so he never expected to genuinely fall for her or want more for the first time in his life. He doesn’t even know if he’s capable of loving someone in return, so when things go south between them when she learns the truth, he thinks he’s getting what he deserves. I love a good tortured hero and Gabe is definitely one of those. He almost lets the best thing that ever happened to him slip through his fingers because he doesn’t feel worthy of her love. Given how heartbreaking his past is, though, it totally made sense. I think he senses a kindred spirit in Calli, so I’m glad that he finally came around and was able to accept her love and let himself be vulnerable with her.
Overall, The Unlikely Bodyguard was a pretty good story, but I felt like the setup for the plot was maybe a little thin. Perhaps the designer pastry business is more cutthroat than I would have imagined, but the lengths to which the villain goes to get Calli’s recipes seemed a little extreme. Also he ultimately didn’t have a lot of teeth, so while there’s some mild danger, the stakes aren’t super high. This being the case, what saved the story for me and earned it four stars are the characterizations and the romance. I thought that Calli and Gabe’s backstories, how those things still affect them in the present, and their actions/reactions were very well done, making perfect sense to me. Because of the similarities in their respective pasts, they relate to one another and fit together like two peas in a pod. At the same time, they’re opposites in personalities with Calli being the sunny, optimistic one, while Gabe is the tortured loner, so this, too, make them a perfect fit. Their romance develops naturally with Calli showing support toward Gabe even when he’s being rather grumpy and Gabe desperately wanting more but not feeling worthy. There’s also plenty of sexual tension from the moment they meet, leading all the way up to some deliciously steamy encounters. So in spite of a few plot weaknesses, I did find this to be an enjoyable read. The Unlikely Bodyguard was originally published in the Silhouette Desire romance line, but was later reprinted in the special Silhouette Marry Me, Cowboy series of reissued favorites.
Review provided by The Hope Chest Reviews