Hate to Want You: Forbidden Hearts

by Alisha Rai

Overview

Alisha Rai, one of contemporary romance’s brightest stars, makes her Avon Books debut with the first novel in the sexy Forbidden Hearts series!

One night. No one will know.

That was the deal. Every year, Livvy Kane and Nicholas Chandler would share one perfect night of illicit pleasure. The forbidden hours let them forget the tragedy that haunted their pasts—and the last names that made them enemies.

Until the night she didn’t show up.

Now Nicholas has an empire to run. He doesn’t have time for distractions and Livvy’s sudden reappearance in town is a major distraction. She’s the one woman he shouldn’t want . . . so why can’t he forget how right she feels in his bed?

Livvy didn’t come home for Nicholas, but fate seems determined to remind her of his presence—and their past. Although the passion between them might have once run hot and deep, not even love can overcome the scandal that divided their families.

Being together might be against all the rules . . . but being apart is impossible.

One of Amazon's Best Romances of the Month & Best Romances of 2017!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062566737
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/25/2017
Series:	Forbidden Hearts , #1
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	531,552
Product dimensions:	4.10(w) x 6.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Alisha Rai pens award-winning contemporary romances, and her novels have been named Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post, NPR, Amazon, Entertainment Weekly, Kirkus, and Cosmopolitan magazine. When she’s not writing, Alisha is traveling or tweeting. To find out more about her books or to sign up for her newsletter, visit alisharai.com.  

Editorial Reviews

08/28/2017
In Rai’s emotional contemporary series launch, dysfunctional families, mental illness, and true love vie for center stage. After a protracted absence, 30-year-old Olivia “Livvy” Kane rolls back into her hometown of Rockville, N.Y., setting everyone’s teeth on edge. Her childhood friend and later occasional lover, Nicholas Chandler, has particularly mixed feelings about seeing her. The formerly inseparable sweethearts have only rendezvoused of late for an annual night of passion. Otherwise, each has ostensibly participated in an ongoing feud between their two families. Livvy plans a longer stay than usual as she helps to nurse her passive-aggressive mother back to health after hip surgery. The visit acts as a catalyst for deeply entrenched bitterness—between and within families—to surface, though hit-or-miss characterizations sometimes lessen its impact. The story line is complex but the ending feels rushed as Rai concludes with a much too easy—almost flippant—dismissal of the blood feud she spent so much effort building up. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Alisha Rai blends emotional characters with passionate sensuality in some of the best examples of erotic romance available.” — Sarah MacLean for the Washington Post (Best Romances of the Month)

“Alisha Rai’s HATE TO WANT YOU is so real and frank [...] a smoking hot, beautifully romantic novel, which is both astounding and refreshing. I’ll be thinking about this book and recommending it for a long time to come.” — Book Riot

“their second chance at romance is a true treat… watching this pair heal together and find love? That’s the true magic.” — RT Book Reviews (4 Stars)

“A sexy, emotionally intense romance wrapped in a fascinating family saga, this is the complete package: hot, heartbreaking, and supremely satisfying.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“an engrossing, hot-as-fire reunion romance... Old feuds, dark secrets and sizzling love scenes make Hate to Want You impossible to put down.” — BookPage

“explosive, passionate...” — Entertainment Weekly

From the Publisher

Alisha Rai blends emotional characters with passionate sensuality in some of the best examples of erotic romance available.

Sarah MacLean for the Washington Post (Best Romances of the Month)

Alisha Rai’s HATE TO WANT YOU is so real and frank [...] a smoking hot, beautifully romantic novel, which is both astounding and refreshing. I’ll be thinking about this book and recommending it for a long time to come.

Book Riot

an engrossing, hot-as-fire reunion romance... Old feuds, dark secrets and sizzling love scenes make Hate to Want You impossible to put down.

BookPage

their second chance at romance is a true treat… watching this pair heal together and find love? That’s the true magic.

RT Book Reviews (4 Stars)

explosive, passionate...

Entertainment Weekly

08/01/2017
Ten years ago, a devastating tragedy shattered the business and personal relationships between Olivia Kane's and Nicholas Chandler's families, making it impossible for the two to be together. Their solution is that Livvy would text Nicholas every year on her birthday, wherever she was in the world, and he would meet her for one ardent night, giving them the chance to be who they once were. But Livvy has come back to town, if only temporarily, and her presence not only dredges up the past, it zeroes in on their relationship—if only Livvy and Nico can get on the same page and figure out how to make things right. Jealousy, resentment, and betrayal are at the core of the conflict in this story, a pattern card for dysfunctional families. VERDICT Emotional anguish; page-singeing, explicit sex; relatable, sympathetic protagonists; and a realistic, well-crafted plot add up to an irresistible read that erotic romance fans will be sure to savor. Rai (Serving Pleasure) lives in Washington, DC.

Library Journal

★ 2017-07-19
After a decade of birthday hookups, a man and woman whose magical love was destroyed by their warring families face their pasts and rediscover one another. First in a series.When tragedy and betrayal ripped apart their families, Nicholas Chandler and Livvy Kane's romance was collateral damage. Nicholas stayed in New York to run the family business while Livvy fled, living a nomadic lifestyle as a tattoo artist. Unable to completely sever their physical connection, they continued to meet once a year for a night of passion in what Livvy calls a "repetitive cycle of pain and desire." But when Livvy returns home to care for her ailing mother, neither disapproving relatives nor the pain of reopening old wounds can keep them away from each other. Rai (Night Whispers, 2013, etc.) approaches her characters with sharpness and sensitivity, deftly establishing Nicholas and Livvy's deep connection in the opening pages. Nicholas' disciplined compartmentalization of his life requires shutting out feelings that would force him to reconsider his choices, while Livvy's tendency to collect unruly emotional baggage is literally written on her skin. Rai is at the forefront of a new wave of romance writers for whom themes of racial and ethnic identity, gender and sexuality, and mental health are not extras but integral to the romance plot because they are necessary for building characters and their worlds. Livvy's experience of depression in particular is authentically portrayed: "Guilt and sadness and darkness were like a fine overlay on her entire life, a veil with the power to tarnish anything good that came her way." A tremendously intriguing cast of secondary characters across three generations includes the couple's siblings, whose stories readers will clamor for. Without ever losing focus on Nicholas and Livvy, Rai shows how porous and mutable the lines between the past and the present, the personal and the familial, the body and the soul really are. A sexy, emotionally intense romance wrapped in a fascinating family saga, this is the complete package: hot, heartbreaking, and supremely satisfying.

Kirkus Reviews

Listeners follow a multigenerational family drama of painful betrayal and dark desire. Livvy Kane and Nicholas Chandler were high school sweethearts, but her father and his mother died together under mysterious circumstances, shattering Livvy’s and Nicholas’s perfect world. More than a decade later, Livvy finally returns home, but nothing has been resolved. Morton excels at balancing Livvy’s sarcasm and vulnerability without sacrificing her defiant inner strength. While a particular weakness is that every female character voiced by York sounds petulant regardless of the situation, he does deliver a believable performance of Nicholas’s struggle between his duty to his family and his desire for his own happiness. Both narrators are adept at narrating scorching romantic scenes—a trademark of the author. The start of a promising series. K.M.P. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

SEPTEMBER 2017 - AudioFile