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Review
4 stars!
A smart, funny, sweet and sexy story with a unique twist to your usual college sports romance as the cocky campus playboy meets his match with a quirky, intelligent heroine with Asperger’s Syndrome.
Ender Hemsworth is the guy on campus that everybody wants. President of his fraternity, tennis superstar, wealthy, good looking and a magnet to the ladies, he appears to be living the dream. And then he receives a letter from his grandmother informing him that Adelaide, one of his childhood friends, is coming to live with him and his brother.
Ender and Adelaide met as children when Ender and his brother travelled to Australia for a summer holiday and the three of them spent every moment of their time together and became close. Though when she arrives, the gorgeous woman who beams up at him is far from the gawky girl that Ender remembers.
Adelaide is smart, sweet and kind, and she is very aware of the differences between herself and others, but she is embracing her new experience with everything she has. She’s had enough of being singled out and judged for who she is, and she’s looking forward to her fresh start in a whole new country. She has wonderful memories of the time she spent with Ender, and even with all of their years apart she still considers him her best friend, and as he helps her settle in, they come to an arrangement where he will be her ‘social coach’, helping her out with social cues, and such.
“I can be your safe person.”
Straightening herself, she blinked at me. “Safe person.” That sounds a lot like a ‘safe word’, which brings to mind stuff like bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism.”
“BDSM”? I coughed loudly. “No, nothing like that.” … “What I mean is, if you’re ever unsure about any social cues, you can always check with me.”
“So you’re going to be my coach?” Her eyes grew wide, though a smile played behind them. “My social coach?”
… “I guess you can call it that.”
But as Ender introduces Adelaide to the wonders and freeness of college life, of course their relationship begins to shift. Adelaide is curious about sex, and who better to help her out than her best friend and social coach? And so sex enters the equation, string-free and purely platonic, but changing things between them in ways that are all kinds of hot.
“There’s not much to tell.” I gave her a modest shrug of the shoulders. “We’re just best friends with benefits.”
… “And you’re okay with that?” Danni looked incredulous. “Like /totally okay with being friends with benefits?”
“Correct.” I dabbed my mouth with a napkin. “Why wouldn’t I be? He’s my best friend and he keeps me sexually satisfied. We make passionate, delectable sex.”
Adelaide is an absolute delight. Strong, smart and brave, I so admired the way she set about creating a new life for herself. She’s very accepting of her limitations, and her mannerisms and thought processes are written in a way that make her utterly endearing, and I just loved her.
“But why is a thigh gap even a desirable quality? If I had a thigh gap, my phone could literally slip through the space between my thighs and splash into the toilet if I dropped it.” I frowned. “And I like being on my phone when I’m sitting on the toilet.”
And oh, I loved Ender. He’s such a good guy and I love how he cared for Adelaide. He’s no-nonsense and he respects and appreciates her just as she is, and though he has his own issues that he’s struggling with, he doesn’t hold anything back from Adelaide, which I really liked.
“We need … people who can see things from a different perspective. People who have a gift for finding and analysing information with their obsessive acquisition of hard facts, their insistence on logic, their ability to see things the way most of us aren’t able to.”
Don’t go into this book thinking it’s a straightforward romance. It’s not. Ender and Adelaide truly are friends with benefits, and it takes a while for real feelings to develop so – full disclosure – they are both with other people in different ways during the book. But it’s only while they’re still friends. Once feelings begin to develop, they are faithful to each other.
The book ends in a good place, though there is still a lot of story to be told, and I’m looking forward to reading more about their relationship progressing in the next book of the series – The Foreplay.
This was a great read. Fun, sweet and very entertaining.
4 stars.
The Hemsworth Brothers
