Stirring Up Trouble

I’m a big fan of the Pine Mountain series, and in my humble opinion, Stirring up Trouble is the best one yet. I smiled – occasionally even laughed, and I cried.
Sloane, who fans of the series will remember as Carly’s roommate from Gimme Some Sugar, is living in the cottage alone now, and searching for inspiration for her next book. Meanwhile, the bills are piling up, and her editor really wants another of her exotic settings which will require money she doesn’t have for a trip to Greece to do research and hopefully, to find the spark that will create a book she doesn’t quite feel.
Gavin, the manager of La Dolce Vita who also had a brief cameo in Gimme Some Sugar is raising his 13 year old sister after the recent cancer death of their mother. Coping with a pre-teens raging hormones and yearning for independence is always a challenging prospect. Add in the fact that both are still aching from the loss of the family matriarch, that Gavin has no experience or real role model as a father figure and that he has a demanding job which often requires late nights and long hours and that his sister Bree resents having been uprooted from her life in the city and dragged to a small town where she has no friends and you have a recipe for disaster.
Fortunately, Bree has a mature, reliable babysitter hired through an agency, but when the motherly Mrs. Teasdale is called away to deal with a family emergency, a difficult situation suddenly becomes desperate. Gavin doesn’t really know Sloane, and he certainly doesn’t approve of her. He thinks she’s flighty, impulsive and, since she writes trashy romance novels, she’s probably not the best influence on a thirteen year old, but it’s only for the weekend, and there’s no one else available to take care of Bree, she’ll have to do.
The last thing Sloane wants to be is a babysitter. She has no maternal instincts and is pretty much a failure in the love an family department as her mother frequently reminds her, but she really needs the money for that research trip to Greece, and Gavin’s offering twice the going rate if she’ll throw in a little tutoring to help get rid of those incompletes in English that Bree is flirting with so she takes the job.
Stirring Up Trouble is definitely a romance novel, full of soft sighs and enough curl your toes love scenes to satisfy the most demanding romance reader, but it’s about relationships and responsibility and about finding yourself and sometimes finding love in the places where you least expect it, so grab yourself a bottle of good wine (there’s are some very key scenes featuring that in this book), curl up by the fireplace or in your favourite chair an get ready for a great read. I think you’ll fall in love with a few more characters from the Pine Mountain gang.

I always enjoy my return visits to Pine Mountain, because I know I am in for a real literary treat!! Ms. Kincaid always creates such heartwarming stories, with very likable characters! Truly a can’t miss series!!