Just Perfect by Julie Ortolon

The second book in the Perfect trilogy by Julie Ortolon, following on from Almost Perfect.

AN ICE PRINCESS

You have to be tough to work in the ER—but Dr. Christine Ashton's courage doesn't extend to riding a chairlift, no matter how much she loves skiing. Her challenge is to strap on a pair of skis and conquer her fear of heights. The bigger challenge, though, will be resisting the sexy ski instructor her friends have deemed off-limits.

A SKI BUM

Alec Hunter is more than just a fun-loving charmer and nothing like the users, losers, and strays Christine usually winds up with. But she's still giving him the cold shoulder, and he's determined to prove how wrong she is about him.

A PERFECT DISASTER?

After helping the victim of a snowboarding accident, the two fall hard and fast—with enough heat to melt the mountains. And everything is just perfect—until Christine must face kind of fear and choose between her dream job back home and her dream man in Colorado.

Okay, so it was a bit sooner than the eventually than I suggested in the review for Almost Perfect. As I said in the comments on Almost Perfect I was enjoying this book more than I did the first in the trilogy, that is until about two thirds of the way through the book, when it descended to more psychological analysis than love story.

So the first half of the book was really good. Christine Ashton looks like an ice princess but actually cusses with the best of them, drinks her beer from the bottle, and she is a really good trauma doctor. She hires Alec Hunter to help her bring her skiing skills back up to scratch so that she can hopefully beat her brother Robbie in a race, so that she can prove to her father that she is as good as Robbie is at some things!

They are attracted to each other immediately, but she thinks that Alec is a ski bum with no job and no future, and she is determined that this time she is not going to fall for some loser bloke who is going to use her and then leave her like so many of her previous boyfriends. Whilst Alec did come from a rough family background, he has worked hard to achieve all her has. Alec is pretty insistent in his pursuit of her, but Christine keeps on resisting until eventually she learns the truth about him.

My favourite parts of the book were where we saw the Mountain Search and Rescue teams at work, helping injured skiers and rescuing some people who got caught in an avalanche. There was also a series of telephone conversations that I really liked between them that took place once Christine returned home, whilst they tried to fight their desire to get together and to get past the fact that they lived so far apart.

However for the last third of the book, I felt as though it got really bogged down in the issues that they both had with their families, and then with working out how they can be together and where that was going to live.

Being a romance it will be no spoiler to know that they will get married, but I really hope that Ortolon doesn't succumb to a triple wedding for the friends in the next book!! I've started the third book, Too Perfect, so we will see how it goes!

Whilst I would have rated the first two thirds of this book better than the first book in the trilogy, the last third brought it back down to the same rating as Almost Perfect.

Rating 4/5