Secretly Yours (A Vine Mess, #1)
Tessa Bailey
A steamy new rom-com about a starchy professor and the bubbly neighbor he clashes with at every turn... Hallie Welch fell hard for Julian Vos at fourteen, after they almost kissed in the dark vineyards of his family's winery. Now the prodigal hottie has returned to their small town. When Hallie is hired to revamp the gardens on the Vos estate, she wonders if she'll finally get that smooch. But the grumpy professor isn't the teenager she remembers and their polar opposite personalities clash spectacularly. One wine-fueled girls' night later, Hallie can't shake the sense that she did something reckless--and then she remembers the drunken secret admirer letter she left for Julian. Oh shit. On sabbatical from his ivy league job, Julian plans to write a novel. But having Hallie gardening right outside his window is the ultimate distraction. She's eccentric, chronically late, often literally covered in dirt--and so unbelievably beautiful, he can't focus on anything else. Until he finds an anonymous letter sent by a woman from his past. Even as Julian wonders about this admirer, he's sucked further into Hallie's orbit. Like the flowers she plants all over town, Hallie is a burst of color in Julian's gray-scale life. For a man who irons his socks and runs on tight schedules, her sunny chaotic energy makes zero sense. But there's something so familiar about her... and her very presence is turning his world upside down.
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03.5⭐️
I really wish Goodreads did half stars, because I feel like this is a solid 3.5 for me. It's better than 3, but not quite 4. Overall, I liked the characters and the plot/conflicts. Everything felt relatively cohesive. However, the "we're so different, it could never work" dialogue/thoughts got a bit old. I think it played into the character development quite a bit, but I still found it slightly irritating. Same with the MMC's mental health journey: it was refreshing to see a male character depicted as having anxiety/panic attacks, and I felt like the descriptions of his feelings were accurate. There was a lot of wallowing and negative self-talk in his inner monologue at first, but that got better as his character developed. I just wish there had been some more emphasis on the professional help side of it beyond just a passing mention of his doctor's strategies. It felt unrealistic to me that he moved past so many of his anxieties and compulsions simply by choosing to or "for" someone else. I don't love the idea that the characters felt they had to change for each other, but that was kind of covered within their thoughts. I would have appreciated it described more as mutual personal growth and quality of life improvement or something rather than something that was required to be with the other person. Now that I'm off my soapbox, the spice and banter were good, as it usually is with Tessa Bailey. The mouth on this man!!!! The plot seemed to wrap up really quickly and I would have appreciated some more mutual groveling, but overall I devoured this and will definitely read the sequel. Despite being a raging alcoholic, Natalie seems like she'll make for a fun read.
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