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When life gives you your enemy, you make a deal with him… Leo Wells is the last person I want to be skating with. He’s aloof, abrasive… and stupidly attractive. Nevermind the fact that I had a lapse in judgment one night with him in the past. We may not like each other, but I like winning more and if I want to do that, I need him. We need each other. Leo doesn’t like the idea anymore than I do, but we make a deal. We can put our differences aside and forget about our history so we can compete together. It should be easy enough–after all, neither of us like the other. But there’s a spark between us, one that reignites a burning fire we lit a long time ago. The lines are blurring and melting like the ice around my heart. Leo Wells is breaking through my walls, tearing them down one layer at a time. And all I can do is tell him how I hate him… Because I’m afraid I don’t hate him at all.
Publication Year: 2024
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0Thank you to Valentine PR and the author for this e-ARC in exchange for my honest review.
This book follows two rival figure skaters, Aria and Leo, who are forced to pair up with each other after finding themselves without a partner for the upcoming figure skating season.
This book is very much an enemies to lovers, forced proximity, but then evolving to an idiots-in-love story. The latter is a trope I'm starting to like and I love seeing it in the books I read. The MCs' justification for why they shouldn't be involved with each other is always so entertaining. However, I didn’t find the reason they “hated” each other to be compelling enough. It just felt very surface level and there was no depth to either of them.
I was excited to read this book because if you’ve been around my page before, then you know that I am a fan of figure skaters and the sport. I’m not an expert by any means, half the time I can’t even tell the jumps apart, but I know the basics. One glaring mistake I saw while reading was that the competition in the book revolved around one routine, whereas in reality, all competitors have short and long programs. After that part, it was clear that this was no more than a spicy romance with figure skating as the backdrop.
If the accuracy of the sport doesn’t matter to you, then you might like this if you enjoy the above tropes plus the one-bed trope.
0 -ice skaters
-rivals to lovers
-forced prox
-one bed
-brothers best friend
Always one to love a brother's best friend trope, let alone an enemies/rivals to lovers theme, I knew this book was going to capture my attention.
Leo and Aria disliked each other right from the start but with a good old forced proximity moment, the book began to take off on a journey of angst with a good dose of cute moments that made me really like the characters.
Maybe because I don't have access to ice, or maybe it's just wishful longing, but ice skating pairs always seems so romantic to me, and this did not disappoint. Things were a little predictable at times, but the way Cali Melle writes kept my interest and made me binge this read.
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