Always a bridesmaid, never a bride—and that’s the way I like it. I may be anti-marriage, but I’m still pro-romance. Case in point? That sexy curmudgeon I met last year during my cousin’s tropical bachelorette getaway. That grump was Dorian, the groom’s old college roommate, there for the bachelor party. I couldn’t get enough of his messy brown hair and gorgeous turquoise eyes. We connected on a deep level—emotionally and physically. But the timing wasn’t right. So we made a pact to reconnect in two years. Now I’m starting a new “job.” It’ll take a lot of work and pays really well—I’m talking seven figures here. All I have to do is pretend to be my boss’s new fiancée…and spend eight weeks with his family on their private island. How hard could it be? Turns out, a lot harder than I thought. Because the man I’m pretending to love? He’s Dorian’s brother, and now all bets are off… Listening Length: 7 hours and 17 minutes.
Publication Year: 2023
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This book was frustrating for me. Being that they are a new-to-me author, I cannot tell if it’s their usual writing style or if the way the story was structured that caused my main issue. The issue was that the MMC and MFC didn’t spend enough time being together. They shared the page quite a bit, but not in the way the couple usually would in a Romance.
Briar and Dorian meet at a bachelorette/bachelor party for their friends and instantly hit it off. They spend a magical few days together but know their current lives will not mesh at the moment. They make a pact to wait for each other. (Their pact alone is something that has “romance reasons” written all over it, you just have to roll with it.) The times spent in the “before” world work and work well. The problem is this story jumps back and forth between one year ago and current times.
In current times, Briar is pretending to be her boss’s fiancé to make his father happy. She will get a payday out of the deal but doesn’t realize so will her boss. He turns out to be a pretty terrible person when all is said and done. What Briar doesn’t know is that her boss’ brother is Dorian. She cannot tell Dorian the truth and it puts them in a pretty awkward position as the whole family is spending two months at the family’s private island. These are the scenes that more times than not did not work for me.
I kept waiting for Briar to somehow tell Dorian the truth or for Dorian to figure things out so they could stop feeling terrible. Then the story would jump back to their initial meeting and I would love them together, but it would once again be cut short by jumping to current times. The more it happened the less I was feeling their connection. I wish the flashback would have been told all at once so I could have been more invested in the couple, but I don’t know if that would have even worked. I needed some sort of connection that wasn’t full of angst in the current-times storyline.
I think I will give this author another chance. There was a whole lot of potential to this story so I’m curious to see how their writing will translate when it’s a straight-shot timeline instead of bouncing around.
03.5
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