but the next one was a bust

I'm disappointed.  I recommend a "new" author to you, and then the very next one I read of hers was awful.  If I'd read this one first, I'd have never even given her a second chance.  So if you try Kathleen O'Reilly, don't do it with Beyond Daring.  It's the next one in the series that started with Beyond Breathless, which--in spite of its rushed ending-- I thought was not too bad.  This one is about the brother of Andrew, the Breathless hero.  Jeff is a PR guy assigned to try to clean up the act of a billionaire's hard-partying daughter before she marries the son of another billionaire.

(Warning:  I give more spoilers in here than usual, because I really don't think you should bother reading this one.  But if you think you might want to, you should stop now.)

Beyond Daring has the same problem as a couple of other romance novels I've read (SEP's It Had to Be You, and Kleypas' Then Came You). The heroine acts like a slut because she's so miserable and angry that no one can figure out that the slut act isn't the "real" her.  But there are two problems with that-- it seems a little unfair to expect the hero (or anyone else) to see who she "really" is when she completely plays the part of the party girl, and secondly, if you're dressed like a slut, you talk like a slut, and you're OK with everyone believing you're a slut.... hmmmmm.  The fact that you haven't actually slept with as many guys as everyone assumes you have doesn't really make that much difference, if you ask me.  Kleypas makes it work eventually by giving her heroine a true reason to be so nuts.   But in SEP's and in this one, the heroine just reads like a spoiled, selfish woman in a snit. You keep on wanting to say, Oh, just grow up and get a spine.  If you don't want people to think you're a slut, don't act like one.

In this book, Sheldon, the heroine, throws herself at every man she meets, wrapping herself around bartenders, athletes, bouncers, anyone she can find.  She doesn't care, because no one has ever cared enough to get to know the "real" her, so why shouldn't she?  Jeff has to pull her off men all the time, put her clothes back on her, take her home.  For the entire novel she tells him that she wants to marry the gazillionaire, that she's fine with being engaged to him, that this marriage is what she really wants.  I don't see how any of this is his fault, but he ends up being the one to apologize, the one that feels bad because he didn't believe in her, because he "let her down."  Every time he apologized again, it made me angrier.  Doesn't she have some responsibility, too?  How can she possibly expect Jeff to come forward and make a big declaration of love when according to words from her very own mouth, she wants to marry somebody else?  I'm starting to rant.  I should stop.

But just one more thing.  Her secret passion is playing the violin.  She's supposed to be this fabulous player that nobody knows about, but she didn't start playing until she was 21 (she's 27, she's been playing for six years, do the math), and in the entire novel, she never practices.  How are we supposed to take this secret passion seriously if she never picks up her violin outside her Friday afternoon sessions with a string quartet?  A serious musician practices.  A lot.

And then there's the appearances by Jeff's siblings, who are the stars of the other novels in the series, that just don't work.  They seem wooden.  And while appearing on TV talk show during which he has participated in the show for several minutes, Jeff stands up and slugs the host while the cameras are rolling on live television, and no one recognizes him or knows it's him, so there's no fallout.  It just kept getting more ludicrous.  Don't bother.  Definitely don't bother.  In fact, I may not even read the third book in the series.  Not only was this one a clinker, but Mercedes, Andrew's and Jeff's younger sister who is the heroine of the next book, is so irritating in this book that I can't imagine reading about her for an entire novel.