I don't normally go for romance genre/enemies to lovers trope type books because I can find them too cliche and predictable (thereby boring) but I wanted a break after a very intense suspense series and did actually quite enjoy this. Had a red flag go up at the start with Cristian being such an asshole that I worried his only "charm" would be in the form of being egotistic and aggressive but he did get a solid character arc and I actually did end up liking him, actually wish we got even more of his past written in. Also thought it was clever that Christian and Arya would be working off of two completely different understandings of their shared history (courtesy of Conrad), that way we could sympathize with both characters and hope for a reconciliation. They also had good banter that was fun to read, definitely a few zingers in there.

My main bone to pick was Arya's character: she's introduced as a badass businesswoman and yet is written as struggling to keep up, missing important meetings because she's minorly distracted, and honestly not doing anything notably impressive with PR aside from a couple mentions in early chapters. This being compared with Christian, who got written with excessive descriptions of his reputation, success, and (aside from the professional issue of his relationship with Arya) infallible competence as a lawyer. Arya also just seems so... Amenable. It'd be one thing if she was intended from the start to be a sweet naive girl, but if she was meant to be as stubborn and cutthroat as she was introduced, why does she spend the majority of the book just going where others lead? She hates Christian because he's awful to her from their first meeting but very quickly becomes infatuated anyway, she listens to her father's sugarcoated narrative even long after she is faced with hard evidence, she accepts her mother back into her life almost immediately after decades of neglect, she has her heart horribly broken and faces public scandal and does absolutely NOTHING about it to stand up for herself beyond a half-assed attempt at telling others to leave her alone, and all of those things would be perfectly fine if they didn't directly contradict the initial claim that she was this real force to be reckoned with. So her whole side of the plot was often just really disappointing or frustrating waiting for her to do anything actually meaningful.

Regardless, this book was juicy and a quick read and beside annoyance with Arya falling short of the mark, I really did like it a lot!