Title: Overruled
Author: Emma Chase
Publisher/Year: Gallery Books 4/28/15
Length: 254 Pages
Series: Legal Briefs #1
Overview
A Washington, DC, defense attorney, Stanton Shaw keeps his head cool, his questions sharp, and his arguments irrefutable. They don’t call him the Jury Charmer for nothing—with his southern drawl, disarming smile, and captivating green eyes, he’s a hard man to say no to. Men want to be him, and women want to be thoroughly cross examined by him.
Stanton’s a man with a plan. And for a while, life was going according to that plan.
Until the day he receives an invitation to the wedding of his high school sweetheart, the mother of his beloved ten-year-old daughter. Jenny is getting married—to someone who isn’t him.
That’s definitely not part of the plan.
***
Sofia Santos is a city-raised, no-nonsense litigator who plans to become the most revered criminal defense attorney in the country. She doesn’t have time for relationships or distractions.
But when Stanton, her “friend with mind-blowing benefits,” begs her for help, she finds herself out of her element, out of her depth, and obviously out of her mind. Because she agrees to go with him to The-Middle-Of-Nowhere, Mississippi, to do all she can to help Stanton win back the woman he loves. Her head tells her she’s crazy…and her heart says something else entirely.
What happens when you mix a one-stop-light town, two professional arguers, a homecoming queen, four big brothers, some Jimmy Dean sausage, and a gun-toting Nana?
The Bourbon flows, passions rise, and even the best-laid plans get overruled by the desires of the heart.
My Thoughts
One thing that our author Ms Chase does well is the sweet romance – and this series is yet another example of that. We start with a pair of high school sweet hearts who find themselves at the precipice of graduation, and what that means since they’ll be going to different schools, adding to that a baby. So, even the best intentions may not give us happy endings and this story is all about that.
Fast forward a few years to DC, where Stanton is a successful lawyer, part of a firm where he’s making his mark, and has a great group of friends around him who all work together. He’s living his life to the fullest in DC since that’s the arrangement that he has with Jenny – his girl and baby mamma, but he’s still got a large part of himself firmly rooted in Mississippi with the family.
When Sofia, another lawyer starts to make him feel more, even though he doesn’t admit that it’s more, well you know that things are going to get complicated. Everyone knows the situation, feelings aren’t part of the mix, it’s only sex and physical, and the emotional bit is with Jenny and Presley. Until Jenny announces that she’s getting married.
The story that we have here is one where we see that there’s a need to understand the difference between loving someone and being in love, and whether you really know who someone is now v. what you remember from years ago.
It’s also a test of how much Sofia will put up with since you know she’s a really smart woman, who’s there to be a great friend, but who will only allow so much to happen around her before it pushes her too far.
There’s a tornado, someone in the hospital, some secrets revealed and we see how things play out. What we see in some of Ms Chase’s books but not all is a bit of heat and steam. There is more passion here than we see sometimes, and that’s a nice change. There’s chemistry between Stanton and Sofia, and when it’s actually written about, well we can see another side to what Emma Chase can bring for us. There’s also a nice little twist about preferences for someone that we didn’t realize before, showing us that Ms Chase is capable of bringing in a twist and secret from time to time.
The nice thing about this first installment is that we met Brent and Jake, friends in their group who are bound to have great stories of their own, and i can’t wait to see what they are about. Enjoy!
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