Lauren Webster has always thought the town of Paradise Key could use a little shaking up. A partner in a marketing firm, Lauren decides to turn her trip to Paradise Key into an opportunity to work with the Tourism Bureau and create a splashy media campaign. Lauren isn’t interested in love—she’s all business from the second she arrives… until the summer love she never forgot leads the fight against her cosmopolitan changes, and Lauren begins to question the life she thought she wanted and the life she left behind.
When Carter Malone’s father has a heart attack, he runs back home to take care of his family. He revels in the small town life, so when he hears Lauren’s plans for commercializing Paradise Key, he steps up as her most vocal opponent. However, he can’t forget the summer they shared and everything unspoken between them.
If Lauren falls for Carter, she risks losing everything she’s worked for. Will this second chance at love be doomed before it has a chance to rekindle?
Titles in the Paradise Key series include: Summer Love Take Two by Shirley Jump – Love At The Beach Shop by Kyra Jacobs – Resort to Love by Priscilla Oliveras – Small Town Love by Susan Meier
Title: Summer Love: Take Two
Series: Paradise Key #1
Author: Shirley Jump
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Published: May 1, 2018
Publisher: Tule Publishing
My Rating: 4.5 stars
Summer Love: Take Two starts off the Paradise Key multi-author series with an emotional romance of past summer love clashing with the realities of the time, and today. On the surface the senseless, sudden of a good friend to four young women in a car accident binds them all a bit tighter. If the sudden wake up call that life is short hits close to the heart, well then something right would come out of another driver’s careless disregard for the rules about texting and driving. Lily was the light of their small group, no matter the time or distance, and Lauren was missing her friend very much today. Being back in Paradise Key brought a boatload of emotions to a head. Grief, memories, heartache and even desperation. She’d once known true love in this place, and also had her heart torn apart when that young man had his eyes on another prize that wasn’t her. Now, a decade later, one loveless marriage in the rear view mirror, and a job that she detests, Lauren is not only grieving but has to make a sales pitch that will make up for the huge mistake she made at her father’s marketing firm. She’d promised she could deliver – but the truth was she had no idea how, or that once again her heart would be engaged with the one man who could break her all over again if she let him.
I enjoyed my time in this new world filled with believable characters, tight friendships, small town closeness and a rekindling of a love that never should have been walked away from. At eighteen you make dumb decisions. It’s true, we’ve all done that. Carter thought he knew what he wanted out of life and it wasn’t to stay in Paradise Key. He loved Lauren but he also wanted a different life than what he could offer her here. So he made the decision to think of this love between them as a summer fling and walked away from everything, including the woman he’d never get over. Watching Carter come to the realization of all he had truly lost, and deciding to try to win his love back was at times painful and always emotional. Lauren is carrying a lot of baggage, so much that’s it’s a wonder she can stand upright. She will fight what her heart knows, until she can learn to fight for what she wants not what her father expects.
If you’re in the mood for an emotional story that rings so very true, then I’d suggest you get started on this new series with Summer Love: Take Two. You’ll find a sweet small town feeling, characters to believe in, always at least one jerk in the mix, and a really good story that sets the mood for what is to come for the rest of this small group of friends. I h ad fun with this one, and that’s the whole point of reading romance.
*I received an e-ARC of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley. That does not change what I think of this story. It is my choice to leave a review giving my personal opinion about this book.*
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