3.5 stars
OVERALL: A cutesy and quick (but decently steamy!) novella involving friends fake dating, 'it's just sex,' and a particularly funny game of Pictionary. Nothing groundbreaking here, but an easy read and good relationship development in a novella.
Content warnings: sexually explicit scenes
My vlog on this book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0-aYCKrgrQ

This was a cute quick story of two friends who have each had previous broken engagements pretending to date so the guy's family won't set him up on further (terrible) blind dates. Zach asks his friend Jo, who has been kind of pining after him for 2 years, and she is happy to say yes, and he thinks "wow, she's such a good actress, it's almost as if she has real feelings for me!"

I read this novella all in one sitting, and I thought the writing had good polish, if the overall tone was a bit Hallmark in its level of cheese and cliche. (But then there was decent steamy sex, so rated R Hallmark??) I liked this story and the characters, it was fun to read, but not going to stay with me I don't think. Probably would have liked it better had I read the previous two novellas in this series to be invested in this family and already be familiar with the members.

The Pictionary scene with the family was quite funny, and I was so pleased to have that scene in the book because I think it went a long way toward establishing connection between our main characters and even getting Zach's family to know and like Jo. My biggest frustrations with novellas are always that there's never enough development on page for me to believe that the 'I love you' was warranted, and a scene like this one really did a lot of that work. Along the same lines, I wish the end had been a more casual "I want to date you, I'm open to love now, you're amazing and have changed my mind on relationships" instead of the declarations of love that we got after a couple of weeks of fake dates and good sex.