Book Review: Christmas Inn Love by Kelly Collins

Reputations are hard to come by in the big city and hard to lose in small towns...

Celia Roberts, the owner of the Hummingbird Inn has it all … almost. She has a wonderful son and a business she loves. Though challenged to make ends meet, she’s come a long way from the tough times she endured as a teenage mom. With the busy Christmas season ahead, things are looking up, until Scrooge himself arrives intent on putting a huge resort next to her inn—a resort destined to put her out of business.

Wealthy business developer Rob McKenna is coming back home to the tiny town of Pinetop, Colorado to tie up loose ends. After the death of his mother, he’s inherited her Victorian home, her dog, and hundreds of acres of land he plans to develop into a resort and sell. It all seems so simple until he runs into Celia Roberts. In high school, she was the “it” girl, and he was nobody. She dated the bully, and he was the target. Now he’s back, and she’s single, and as beautiful as ever. However, she’s the only thing standing between him and his plan to get in, get rich, and get out of town.

He wants to move the small town into the future. She wants to preserve the past. Can the magic of Christmas leave them both with full hearts and bright futures or will one of them end up with nothing under the tree?

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My Review:

I had high expectations before I even started reading that I was going to love this story. There’s very little that Kelly Collins has published that I haven’t completely and utterly adored. This book did not break the pattern. Celia is a fierce, independent single mom because she hasn’t had the choice to be anything else. Rob escaped Pinetop as soon as he could with no real plans to ever come back. When the pair come back in contact with each other for the first time since high school, the sparks start flying. These are complex characters with vastly different motivations. I loved watching them discover the new people that those old students had become. The story is peppered with wonderfully absurd every-day moments that made me giggle and a few deeply emotional ones that left me sighing. I adored the ending to this book, but I hated to see it was over already. I received a complimentary advanced copy of this book from the author.