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Christina Lauren, returns with a delicious new romance between the buttoned-up heir of a grocery chain and his free-spirited artist ex as they fake their relationship in order to receive a massive inheritance. Anna Green thought she was marrying Liam “West” Weston for access to subsidized family housing while at UCLA. She also thought she’d signed divorce papers when the graduation caps were tossed, and they both went on their merry ways. Three years later, Anna is a starving artist living paycheck to paycheck while West is a Stanford professor. He may be one of four heirs to the Weston Foods conglomerate, but he has little interest in working for the heartless corporation his family built from the ground up. He is interested, however, in his one-hundred-million-dollar inheritance. There’s just one catch. Due to an antiquated clause in his grandfather’s will, Liam won’t see a penny until he’s been happily married for five years. Just when Liam thinks he’s in the home stretch, pressure mounts from his family to see this mysterious spouse, and he has no choice but to turn to the one person he’s afraid to introduce to his one-percenter parents—his unpolished, not-so-ex-wife. But in the presence of his family, Liam’s fears quickly shift from whether the feisty, foul-mouthed, paint-splattered Anna can play the part to whether the toxic world of wealth will corrupt someone as pure of heart as his surprisingly grounded and loyal wife. Liam will have to ask himself if the price tag on his flimsy cover story is worth losing true love that sprouted from a lie.
Publication Year: 2024
Omg, I actually love Anna as a main character. I feel like usually female protagonists, especially with the kind of personality of Anna (she's not fully "quirky girl", but there's definitely aspects that fall into that, and her falling to humour a lot as a defence mechanism in serious moments) are pretty emotionally immature, but she is so aware. I love this development in her character as well from naive to being able to see the situation and explain it so clearly. Also, the emotional maturity of when she's trying to show Liam he's being gaslit to which he tells her she doesn't know his family, to not argue against him and instead admit "You're right, I don't. However..."
do you ever pick up a book and then feel like you are being watched because of something it mentioned? i literally picked this up to get out of a slump, and have been in such a resident evil vii and viii rabbit hole lately, and what is mentioned in the literal first sentence of the book? resident evil village wtf.
Ah, Christina Lauren.... the saviour of my slumps (istg, if this is the first book of hers I read and hate, I'm going to be so mad)