Heaven, Texas - Benci Tapi Rindu by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Dan Jenkins is a well known male writer about football characters but his work is very different from this female romance writer’s. She fully develops football characters, including Bobby Tom Denton, and she does this from a woman’s perspective. Her husband has worked in the executive end of football and she brings a total ring of authenticity to this book as a result. And it does in the hands of the incomparable Susan Elizabeth Phillips. Only in the hands of a terrific romance writer could this unpromising premise bloom in full glory. This aspect of the plot is also something I would ordinarily hate! The heroine, Gracie Snow is no great beauty although she becomes mildly pretty after BT’s friends and relatives work on her hair, clothing and makeup. The basic premise of the story is that BT (that’s what everyone calls him), a man who has everything and whom no woman can “reel in” for marriage, falls in love with a virgin spinster who has worked in a nursing home her whole life. That this undoubted chauvinist also is surrounded by a bevy of gorgeous women, whom he refers to as “prime cut,” would ordinarily have me howling in outrage. The hero’s name is Bobby Tom Denton and I’ve never met a man who has two first names, something I would usually consider to be a “redneck” type of name.

The very phrase “good old boy” makes me cringe. I also have not met many people from Texas and certainly no male football players from there. The first book in her football series is It Had To Be You, continues with Nobody’s Baby But Mine, and finishes with Dream a Little Dream. Heaven, Texas is the second book in Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ football series, all of which can be read independently from one another.

Heaven, Texas - Benci Tapi Rindu by Susan Elizabeth Phillips