Sparks-both sexual and antagonistic-fly when Liberty meets Churchill’s aloof eldest son, Gage, and things are further complicated when Hardy reappears and Liberty begins to discover secrets in her family’s past. There she meets elderly investment mogul Churchill Travis, who, after a horse-riding accident puts him in a wheelchair, offers her a job as his personal assistant. She manages to get a beauty school scholarship, which leads to a job in an exclusive Houston salon. When Hardy leaves town and her mother dies in a car accident, Liberty is left with no money, little education, and the custody of her two-year-old half-sister. Liberty Jones grows up in a Texas trailer park, pining after bad boy Hardy Cates, whose wild behavior conceals a streak of kindness. (Many authors* producing both contemporary and historical romances have been known to lose sight of the fact that readers have different expectations for modern characters than they do for historical ones.) Sugar Daddy features an unusually well-adjusted romantic interest, and further separates itself from the majority of romantic melodramas by resisting the urge to subject its heroine to continuous soap opera-worthy suffering. Sugar Daddy, Lisa Kleypas’s first contemporary romance novel, is entertaining, well-written, and-best of all-free of anachronistic sexual politics.

Hardy cates lisa kleypas