GRR Reviews Dare to Desire (Dare to Love Book 2) by Carly Phillips

Dare to Desire is yet another spin on the old trope about two people with old wounds learning to love again, but the author did manage to wrung out some fresh spins on the details. Unfortunately, the extra issues about a fight for the estate of the mother turned out to be mostly a page filler dud.

Alex Dare had a dysfunctional family... being the bastard child of a billionaire, but it took him a long time to learn that fact, and his early retirement from professional football as a star quarterback due to traumatic brain injury left him despondent, for football was all he knew. He could have any women he wanted, but he only wanted one, social worker Madison Evans, whom he drove away when he received news that he can no longer play. Madison can't date Alex with his wild lifestyle, for she had severe abandonment issues. Her mother left her with her father without a word, and one day her father left her at the mall, never to return. Despite Alex's changed ways, he had already broke her heart once. But now that he's retired and changed... Will she give him another chance? And how can he convince her of that, when she's struggling to keep control of her adopted mother's estate as per her wishes against her "brother", who needed the estate to bolster his own failing finances, instead of going to the public park project the way her mother would have wanted?

This parallel plot simply fizzled out as a part of "family drama" when it was simply chalked up to "greed" and crocodile tears. And she didn't even win, the will was simply invalidated and the executorship transferred to the biological son from the adopted daughter... despite a will written appointing her as the executor. The excuse was the mother "may not be of sound mind" despite it was early in her diagnosis of dementia, and the only explanation was "courts prefer biological children". That's so arbitrary and so tangential to the plot it felt like filler material just to make the FMC feel bad and fall for the MMC's charms.

Category: Contemporary

Primary Plot: Retired Quarterback tries to woo back the woman he loved but drove away when he was forced to retire due to injury

Tropes: Athlete, reunion, evil parents, evil siblings

Overall Rating:  3/5