Aerie
About
Cara Larson's world is fraying at the seams. She has come back home to Portland after years building a successful career designing computer systems on the east coast. Her mother is ill, her latest project is a high tech pressure cooker, and now Liam Scofield has just dropped into her office with a new, and frankly brilliant, idea that is going to disrupt the tenuous balance she had fooled herself into thinking she had on her life. It didn't help that he was drop dead handsome...
Liam Scofield is not sure whether to be annoyed or entranced. Cara Larson has just schooled him on the limits of his latest business idea while her punk of an assistant, Mike Taylor, danced circles around his lack of technology expertise. Yet, somewhere in that exhilarating exchange, she offered him the chance to turn his idea into the opportunity of a lifetime. Risky, but enticing. The opportunity, he reminded himself, not the beautiful Cara Larson...
Praise for this book
A compelling romance between two top-of-their-game business people who might find they are stronger...together. Cara and Liam come from two entirely different worlds: she's in IT infrastructure and he's a god of sportswear with an idea for a game-changing end-to-end customer experience. Can they work together despite their differences? This plot showed real insight into the war between long term and short term business interests, delivered in a pace-y accessible way. A bit depressing to see how the consumer is the least important element to some business minds at best, and more probably an irrelevant irritant too often though. An excellent read. I found every chapter had something at the end that made me turn the pages for something more.
Aerie takes place in the fast-paced world of tech development in the early 90s. Little does Cara Larson know when her firm is hired by Windwear, it will come with handsome CEO Liam Scofield and that it will nearly destroy both of their careers. When Cara meets Liam, she falls in love with him in spite of herself. Their love is tested when Cara is accused of stealing the Aerie software, and again when Liam’s company is threatened by lawyer Lauren Janelle’s underhandedness, but the two emerge victorious, both in business and with their relationship in tact.
Aerie is well-written. Though there is a lot of technical jargon, it is approachable. While the specifics of some of the business/tech talk was lost on me, I was propelled forward, curious to see how the relationship between Liam and Cara would play out. I liked that their story was a romance in the true sense of the word–Riley has penned a sweet courtship in a world where erotica sells–which is why it held my attention the way it did. Though I questioned why, given that Liam was about to propose to Cara, he would be so quick to believe the lies Lauren and Cara’s boss, Peter told him about Cara, he does realize the error of his ways around the middle of the story. From then on out, he does his best to make it up, redeeming himself in the minds of both Cara and the reader.
If I had one wish for this book it would be that there were less on the business end of Aerie’s story. If some of that were edited out of Aerie’s 475 pages, the book would be a more manageable length, the pace would quicken, and Cara and Liam’s story would be in the forefront where it belongs, rather than being given near equal time with the development, theft, and sale of the Aerie software.
Overall, Anne Riley’s Aerie is a pleasurable diversion into the world of early software and Web development and industrial intrigue against the backdrop of a sweet romance that is well worth the read.