Too Hot to Handle is a delight from start to finish. Jasper is drawn to Rita, and he wants to prove to someone somewhere that he’s not just the town’s resident man slut, and he’s drawn to Rita’s snark as well as her vulnerability.

Luckily, Jasper Ellis, Hurley’s resident bad boy, shows up on his motorcycle in time to rescue them. Things don’t go as planned, though, of course, and the Clarkson siblings soon find themselves stranded on the side of the road with a broken-down car near the town of Hurley, New Mexico. She’ll just do this one thing for her mother, suffer the company of her siblings, and then go back to school. She figures she’ll get a chance for a new start in New York, doing anything but cooking, at which she has become a spectacular failure thanks not only to the fire at the restaurant but also a viral video of her attacking a fellow reality cooking show contestant with a knife.

She’s inherited the restaurant her mother managed, and it’s burned down, which means the albatross of her mother’s expectations is no longer around her neck. Rita, our heroine for this adventure, is all in. She’s hoping it’ll be a bonding experience, because the Clarksons have all drifted apart. Miriam Clarkson’s dying wish was that her four children, chef Rita, politician Aaron, gruff and broody Belmont, and Peggy should travel together across the country to jump naked into the Atlantic Ocean.

Continue reading to see how it worked for me and then stay for the gratuitous Hamilton references. However, the premise of Too Hot to Handle was interesting, so I snagged it, determined to see where I would fall on the Tessa Bailey hype bandwagon. Being first and foremost a heroine-centric reader, this… does not help me very much. No mention at all of the heroines or whether the alphas in question have anything else going for them aside from dirty mouths. I’ve had the first in her Line of Duty books on my TBR for a while, but most of what I’ve heard is that her books feature dirty-talking alphas. I wasn’t sure how well I would get along with my first Tessa Bailey book. Shannon C’s review of Too Hot to Handle (Romancing the Clarksons, Book 1)by Tessa BaileyĬontemporary romance published by Forever on

Too Hot to Handle by Tessa Bailey