Just My Luck by Kelley Vitollo

Betsy Harris has worked for her sexy lawyer boss Jace Macnamara for years. She has been secretly in love with him for just about the entire time. One day, Jace’s grandfather dies and in his will it stipulates that Jace can only keep his childhood home if he is married. Jace feels incredibly betrayed by his grandfather and can’t think of any way to fix things until he considers his trusty friend & employee, Betsy. He is aware that Betsy has (in his mind) a little crush on him and he knows it is a lot to ask but he asks if she would be willing to marry him right away and live with him for 6 months to help him out. He believes she needs a little financial help so he offers her cash as an incentive. Betsy does need some extra cash, but she wants to keep Jace in the dark about why she needs it. She needs the money for her mother’s care facility. Betsy’s mother is a little loopy. On a bad day she is like the mom from “Carrie”, but on a good day she is nice but with a pinch of difficult thrown in. IT didn’t help her mother’s state of mind that Betsy was conceived through rape. Due to Betsy’s background, she has always been a little timid around men in general and hasn’t had a lot of relationship experience. In this book the two friends and co-workers get to know each other on a more emotionally intimate level and dance around an attraction – an attraction that is new on Jace’s part. The thing that is hampering their growing relationship is Betsy’s secrecy regarding her mother. Jace feels that she’s keeping something from him but doesn’t know what. He wishes she would trust him more. Betsy just doesn’t want to be known as the girl with tons of baggage and doesn’t want anybody, especially Jace, look at her with pity. This was a sweet romance about the importance of trust. I liked the contrast between Jace’s feeling like he can open up to Betsy about personal things that he doesn’t usually with other people, and Betsy’s feeling as though she has to clam up. There were a lot of sweet scenes between the two & I found the end satisfying.