Frozen Heart, Melting Kiss

by Ellie Darkins

Food to heal his soul…

Shy and vulnerable Maya Hartney has one great passion—cooking. She's turned her greatest pleasure into a thriving business, and nothing fulfills her more than delighting her clients. Until she's hired by taciturn workaholic Will Thomas to cater a charity dinner….

Only, where Will's concerned, Maya can do no right! The solution? Sign him up for one of her cookery courses and force the man to fall for her food. A week, one-on-one, cooking and tasting, proves to be a lot more intense and emotional than either of them are expecting! And it comes with a delicious new taste sensation…a kiss….

Genres: Romance, Contemporary Romance

256 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Ellie Darkins is a writer, editor and reader of romance novels. When she's not tapping away at her keyboard she can usually be found next to the kettle, knitting *another* jumper, or in the local library sampling the coffee, cake and romance novels.

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this a lot more than I actually did. The premise sounded cute but the execution just wasn’t there. 90% of the book is repetitive exposition from the MC’s inner monologs and it just wasn’t that interesting the 15th time. I never felt like the MCs formed any kind of meaningful connection and the black moment at the end was overwrought and dragged out for no real reason. Plus the book was way too long. You could easily drop 30% of it without losing anything of value.


The story begins with Maya, a caterer, at Will’s office for a tasting. He has a charity function that is being sponsored by his job coming up and needs someone to provide the food. His secretary happens to know Maya and arranged the tasting. Right from this opening scene Maya started to get on my nerves. Will is acting like an aloof prig and refusing to taste most of the food she’s brought, not because he doesn’t like it, he just can’t be bothered. Which I agree would be very irritating because I’d feel like he was wasting my time, but this hurts her so deeply on a personal level that she’s on the verge of tears by the end. The one dish he does try he says is “fine” and that’s like a dagger to her heart.

Her inner monologue goes on and ON about how her entire sense of self is centered around people liking her food. That her parents were uncaring absentees who sent her off to boarding school and never gave her an ounce of praise. Then in college she made dinner for some of her dorm mates and they liked it so she latched onto cooking as her entire personality from that point on. Her self-esteem is 100% based on making people happy, mostly through food, but also from just never saying no to anyone. She’s so desperate for approval that she does whatever anyone asks, regardless of how much trouble it’ll cause her.

I found it hard to connect to Maya. It’s bad enough that she’s such a doormat, but for her to be on the verge of tears because someone she just met told her that her food was fine is just nuts. How did she ever survive culinary school? How has she operated a successful business? Are you seriously telling me that Will is the first client she’s ever had who didn’t shower her with praise? She leaves and tells her friend she won’t cater Will’s event. Then we’re treated to lots more inner monolog woolgathering about how if she couldn’t make him happy with her food, then she had nothing to offer him.

For absolutely no reason Will’s boss gets upset about Maya. He demands to know what Will did to upset her and then threatens to fire Will and stop the company’s contributions to Will’s charity if he doesn’t get Maya back. The boss has zero connection to Maya and, as far as we know, has never even said hello to her. But he’s ready to fire one of his top performing, most dedicated workers and screw over a charity just because she can’t act like a professional.

So Will has to track Maya down at her house. However he doesn’t just tell her that the charity will lose its backing if she doesn’t help out, which would have been the most expedient way of accomplishing his goal. Instead he says that he doesn’t appreciate food the way she does but he’s willing to learn. She agrees to teach him. And so begins an excruciatingly long week where nothing is happening but we get endless pages of inner monolog. Maya goes on and on about how Will keeps pulling away from her, how he isn’t trying, how he retreats into himself any time they start to make just a little progress. Will thinks about how he simply has to keep his distance because he’s the stereotypical hero who had a heartbreak in his past and thus vowed to never love again.

In Will’s case it was his foster mother (FM) of 3 years who got cancer and died when Will was 15. She liked to cook so he has apparently refused to get any enjoyment out of food for the 15 years since she died because the slightest little flicker of a taste bud unleashes an all-consuming torrent of pain. So not only is he attracted to Maya, he also sees the food connection with her and thus knows that if he gives her half a chance, she’ll worm her way into his heart and then he’ll have to experience that pain of loss all over again if she leaves.

So we spend 80% of the book with this “come close, no go away” routine where every time Will takes a micro step forward, he then jumps back a mile. Maya is frustrated but still, allegedly, attracted to him. She doesn’t want to get involved with an emotionally unavailable man, which is exactly what Will is, but for some reason just keeps hoping. She attaches an inordinate amount of significance to everything Will does, both good and bad. His every withdrawal and casual remark tears her heart out. His every half smile fills her with warmth.

Nowhere in all of this long angstingfest do we get anything even remotely resembling a steamy scene to help us understand why these two are still hanging around together. I mean, right from the first day Will figures out that Maya is empathetic to a fault, so why didn’t he just explain his situation and beg her to cater for him. She totally would have done it. But no, he just keeps forcing himself to soldier on while being determined to maintain an emotional distance from her.

The only time Will acts like anything but an automaton is when Maya is hurt. The first day she cuts her finger on a knife and he doctors her up with the first aid kit. They have an almost-kiss right there so you think we’re being set up for some sexual tension fireworks the whole book, but we’re not. They spend the next 200 or so pages having zero chemistry or physical interaction. Snore.

One day Will gets pissed at Maya for pushing him emotionally and he admits that the only reason he’s there is because he’d have been fired otherwise. This destroys Maya because she’d built up this fantasy in her mind that he was actually there for her, but then he tells her a little bit about his sad childhood so she gets over it. Then Maya gets a day-long migraine and Will gets to play nursemaid again. He ends up sleeping next to her in the bed and in the wee hours they share a kiss. In the morning it seems they’ve crossed into sort of being in a relationship.

There’s also a side plot about one of Maya’s friends/neighbors constantly turning up on her doorstep with some emergency that she expects Maya to bail her out of. Will rightly pegs this as Maya being so desperate for acceptance that she’ll do anything for anyone. (Which, incidentally, made me wonder about Maya’s sexual history. I mean, a girl who will do anything anyone asks just so that they’ll like her sounds like a one-way ticket to promiscuity, don’t you think?) And he pressures her to stop being such a doormat. That opportunity presents itself when the neighbor shows up the day after Maya’s migraine with another request for emergency babysitting. Will has to very pointedly clear his throat and literally push Maya forward before she grows a pair and says no.

Then Will fixes her dinner and they go for a walk. They kiss but she pushes him away and demands that he tell her the rest of his bad childhood. The story is that his foster father (FF) was so overcome with grief that he essentially ignored Will after FM’s death. When a social worker came for a welfare check, she and the FF were locked in a room together for a long time and afterward Will was taken back to the group home. He never saw his FF again. That rejection ultimately hurt more than losing his FM to cancer because she died, whereas the FF apparently chose to reject him, causing Will to lose his whole family and the only home he’d ever had at the same time.

After this confession Maya tells Will that she’ll cater his function no matter what now. He doesn’t have to stay for the full week. When his face shows relief, Maya immediately jumps to the conclusion that he’ll be out the door as soon as he can get his bag packed. Will has to soothe her ruffled feathers and promise that of course he’s staying. Then she pushes him to explain what it is that he feels for her. He fumbled and stutters and then finally says that he thinks he loves her. She’s shocked but says in her inner monolog that “of course” she’s been falling in love with him too, but that it seems lame for her to just say it back to him now. Will is apparently fine with her not verbally reciprocating his feelings and they end up going to bed together to have off-page sex.

The next morning Maya wakes up to find Will’s bag is packed and he’s rushing out of the house. He say he’s just gotten a call from the hospital and his FF was just admitted with chest pains. (Why did the hospital call him at all when he’s got no official connection to the FF? How did they even track Will down?) Maya says that she’ll go with Will. He tells her that no, he has to go. He’s being so cold that Maya is already suspecting the worst but she recognizes that he’s upset so she tries again. She tells him that she loves him and she knows he’s scared but that they’ll face this together. Will tells her no, that he’s leaving and that “this was a mistake.” Then he’s out the door.

Maya is devastated but decides that she’s never going to let this happen again. That she’s going to stand up for herself from here on out. Will, meanwhile, has been at the hospital. His FF is fine. When he woke up to find Will by his bedside he was happy and allegedly started trying to apologize but Will waved him off. This really pissed me off because I felt like we got cheated out of the most important scene in the book.

The FF’s abandonment of Will was the catalyst for everything he’d put himself through the last 15 years. He’s completely isolated himself from the world, never forming any kind of emotional attachments. It wasn’t really the FM’s death that did it. If his FF had kept Will and they’d dealt with their grief together and then carried on as a family, Will would have turned out a totally different person. But it was the combination of the pain of losing both parents and his home that taught Will that loving people was too great a risk.

And we got cheated out of the moment where we heard how FF had felt about that action. What happened after Will was taken back to the group home? Did he spend years wallowing in his grief and never really notice that Will was gone? Had he asked for Will to be taken away? Or had the social worker forced the issue for some reason? Had FF tried to fight for Will? Had he tried to see him later on and been denied? Had he been too ashamed to face Will? These are the kinds of questions I want answered when you’re talking about the moment that literally defined a person’s entire life. But we don’t get any of that. Will and FF are just magically friends again like nothing ever happened. No guilt or lingering anger at all. Lame.

Meanwhile, Will has realized that he’s destroyed his relationship with Maya. He admits that he’d been in a panic when he got the call about the FF. That his first thought was that this is what happened when you let people into your heart, they eventually got taken away and it hurt. So in that instant he’d seen Maya only as a source of something that could hurt him and thought he was better off without her. Now that he’s calmed down, he realizes that he screwed up. He tries to call her but she doesn’t call back.

FF notices Will checking his phone every 5 seconds and asks what’s up. Supposedly Will explains the whole situation but it doesn’t happen on-page and I again felt cheated. How did he explain why he’d pushed Maya away without the blame falling squarely on FF? I mean, he’s literally the reason why Will did it. So how could that conversation possibly have gone without the FF ending up feeling super guilty? But we’ll never know because it was all hand-waved away.

Will goes to see Maya the next day but she tells him to get lost. That he’s the one who taught her that she should stand up for herself so that’s what she’s doing. He leaves. I had trouble getting behind Maya’s continued anger at this stage. I mean, she knows that Will was under extreme stress when he said it and within a few hours had come to his senses and started apologizing. And it’s not like she didn’t have plenty of warning that he wasn’t especially emotionally available. One week baking cookies together doesn’t cure 15 years of ingrained behavior with zero chance of regression. But I guess we’re all supposed to be 100% on Maya’s side here because of girl power or whatever.

A week goes by and Will mails Maya his FM’s beloved cookbook, along with a letter apologizing again and saying that he’ll always love her, even if she never speaks to him again. This is profound to her because that’s what she’s always wanted. Unconditional love that she doesn’t have to buy with cooking and favors. But, she tells the reader, it doesn’t matter that Will loves her. It doesn’t even matter that she loves him. What matters is whether she can forgive him, and the answer is no. What kind of bogus crack are you smoking girl? It’s not like he slept with your sister or anything. He said something harsh during a time of extreme stress and almost immediately apologized. Get over yourself. If she can’t see her way past this, then she doesn’t really love him.

She doesn’t respond to his letter but does still cater his function. While there she spies on him from the kitchen but is too afraid to talk to him. Eventually she’s forced out of the kitchen and deliberately ignores him and keeps her back to him, even when she’s talking to FF, which I found both cowardly and disrespectful. Then suddenly she has a mini-panic attack and runs into the hall. And we’re supposed to believe that these feelings of panic are her first twinges of understanding of what Will must have been feeling the day he ran out on her. Like, seriously, we’re supposed to believe that this adult woman had no clue, even after weeks of going over that scene in her mind, that Will was reacting out of stress and anxiety instead of just being mean.

Will comes out and apologizes again. And even though Maya has had her little epiphany, she still makes him work for it and lets him start to walk away thinking she’s unmoved. Then she finally says “don’t I get a say in this?” and other things about how she’s all about standing up for herself now, and she’s decided to keep him. The end.



All in all, I just wasn’t that moved. I found both characters to be annoying and hard to connect to. The long passages of exposition were tedious to read. And I never felt any kind of spark between Maya and Will to explain why they were supposedly attracted to each other. The ending dragged on for too long and only served to make me dislike Maya for being so dramatic. Overall, can’t recommend.

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reviewed for Eight Book Minimum.

[Layla · Rating 1 out of 5]

tried about 3 times to get into this as I liked the title. could not get into it at all. Its a no from me.

[Fiona Marsden · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this more than I did. It has all the ingredients for a delicious dish.

An emotionally remote and scarred hero. Tick
A needy heroine willing to do anything for love and acceptance. Tick
Sweet cottage in the English countryside to hang out in. Tick
Two people stuck together in a kitchen cooking up some conflict. Tick.

It was obvious very early on that both hero and heroine were destined to follow a character development arc to get over their issues. They had almost opposite yet matching childhood traumas and their response to those traumas was also very different.

I liked both characters, workaholic Will Thomas who had locked away his heart and couldn't even allow himself to like delicious food, and Maya Hartney who uses her cooking to buy affection and respect.

Thrown together for a week they get to know each other, poking and prodding at their respective wounds until something has to give.

Overall this was a sweet romance between two people who complemented each other and despite appearing to be opposites, were believable together.

I found Maya's growth from needy, love me love my food to empowered woman a little hard to believe occasionally. Especially as she went from loving nurturer to unforgiving bitch in half a page at one point. Shall we say her growth was a little uneven. But the end was very nice.

I think, after reading back through what I've said here, is that the reason why it didn't quite work for me was that I could see the mechanics working too clearly. This could be because I read way too many of these books. But I think part of it is that this is a new author and hadn't quite got the knack of hiding those inner workings by sweeping me away.

Final comments. The characters were well done despite being uneven at times, the setting was lovely and the story well thought out despite those minor concerns I've mentioned.

Disclaimer: I was given this book for an honest review and I don't read a lot of sweet romance these days.

[Trenchologist · Rating 2 out of 5]

The character descriptions should have been catnip for me but left me meh instead. A whole, whole lot in the major breakthrough sense happened without my knowing when, why, or how, beyond being told so. That was most of the book--a lot of being told what was happening and how they felt, not being shown that. I had a difficult time getting drawn into them and in the end wasn't invested in their happy ending. It read round-and-round for me, too, as they kept covering the same ground in their heads, but then after all that angst, it was suddenly resolved and gone and they moved on. I don't even know why they fell in love.

I found the heroine's business model of owning a cottage and teaching live-in cooking classes out of it fine on the surface, but then I worried about her safety when I thought about it too much. Which shows that while reading, I wasn't absorbed enough and had time to think about such details too much. Aha.

I wish I liked it more; it had its moments and again, the premise had me excited. But this book & I were not the right match.

[Sarah Capps]

I Didn't like this book at all.

[Nas Dean · Rating 5 out of 5]

FROZEN HEART, MELTING KISSES by debut author Ellie Darkins is a Harlequin Romance release for September 2014.

Maya Hartney signs Will Thomas for one of her cooking classes as he finds nothing good in her cooking! But she hadn’t counted on the closeness and the chemistry which would spark up between them.

Could Will ever be agreeable? Why was he so prickly anyway? Peel the layers by reading FROZEN HEART, MELTING KISSES and see for yourself why. Debut author Ellie Darkins brought out angst and scorching chemistry between Maya and Will which would keep a reader glued to the pages till the last pages.

[Gail · Rating 4 out of 5]

The hero is as closed off as any I've ever read, refusing to even enjoy food, which insults the heroine. She refuses to cook for anyone who won't like her food, and when she declines the catering job, it gets the hero in trouble with his boss. So he calls to see how he can fix things, and she will take nothing less than his full immersion in cooking and his senses at her cookery school in the lovely English countryside. Basically, she pries him open like a reluctant oyster. It's a nice story. Slow, but nice. I liked it.

[Harlequin Books]

"Fun and humorous, this is a love story that’s worth sinking your teeth into. Readers will adore Will and Maya’s relationship" (RT Book Reviews, 4 1/2 stars TOP PICK!).

[Hedy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A cute romantic story with colourful characters, yummy action and a location that you wish were yours.