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Review

4.5 sweet, fun, tropey stars!

I love this book! A fake-dating, lessons-in-seduction, friends-to-lovers college sports romance that is fun, sexy, and gorgeously emotional. It made me laugh and made me swoon, and I fell in mad love with these characters and their chemistry-filled love story.

Despite being advertised as a “complete standalone”, this book is actually interconnected with Fair Catch, and there is another book coming for one of the side characters, Quarterback Sneak. It absolutely reads well on its own though, just beware there are some minor spoilers for Fair Catch.

Giana is a college sophomore who works as the assistant PR Co-ordinator for her school’s football team. Though she’s a book-loving introvert who prefers to keep to herself, she spends her days wrangling football players, and she’s damn good at her job. Her latest challenge is Clay Johnson. He’s a football superstar, and while he’s usually happy, polite and friendly, he’s just been dumped by his long-term girlfriend, and he’s in no mood for publicity or playing nice with the media. Giana is charged with working with him to fix his bad attitude and get his head back in the game.

Clay has nothing but respect for nerdy Giana and all of the work that she does with the team, but his heart is broken, and he can think of little else but getting his girl back. So when he notices Giana mooning over a singer at a local bar, he proposes a plan that will help them both – he’ll be a good boy for the media if she agrees to fake date him, with the added bonus that he’ll get her guy to notice her, it will make his ex jealous, and they’ll both get the people they want to be with.

I sat back, tapping a finger against my chin as I tried to recall all the fake-dating tropes I’d read. The truth was I read about a book a day, so they all blurred together after a while. But one thing I knew about pretending to date someone was that you absolutely needed rules, or things got messy.
“No PDA,” I finally said.
Clay made a buzzer sound, the noise so loud a few students at the tables around us looked over their shoulders. “Impossible. No one who’s actually dating avoids PDA.”
“Fine.” I made a face. “Then we need a safe word.”
“A safe word?” Clay chuckled. “Do you think I’m going to be tying you up, Kitten?”

So their sort-of-friendship very quickly shifts to include cosy ‘dates’, long conversations and lots of PDA, and it seems that their crazy plan is working. But Giana realises that she’s in a world of trouble when her crush really does notice her, and she realises she’s completely unprepared for all that that means. So she asks her new friend, Clay (the man who she has very quickly come to trust above all others), for some practical, ‘hands on’ lessons in how to impress a man – and while he’s at it, would he please pop her cherry so she knows what she’s doing in bed.

Clay is stunned. But, being the generous sweetheart that he is, he can’t bear the thought of Giana turning to anybody else with her request. He wants the best for her, he doesn’t want her hurt, disappointed, or degraded in any way, and he knows the man for the job. And so begin the lessons in seduction, and damn, it’s steamy.

“You don’t want to be someone’s muse, you want to be someone’s undoing. And let me tell you, Kitten… You’re mine.”

It’s a storyline that many of us have read before, but this one has that little something ‘extra’ that makes it stand out as a really fun and emotional read. Giana and Clay are fantastic characters, everything between them develops so well, they become close friends, and there is lots of laughter and fantastic banter. They genuinely care for each other, there are a lot of fun moments, and their flirty teasing is so much fun. They both acknowledge that they are attracted to the other, and they embrace their arrangement whole heartedly, and I loved their chemistry and the depth of their connection.

“Another tip you picked up from my books?”
“Those things are like a treasure map. Just follow the tabs and highlights to find the pot of gold.”

Clay is an absolute sweetheart. We see that from the very beginning, and all the way through the story. He’s not a player, or a bad boy who needs reforming, he’s a genuinely good guy with a huge heart, a wicked sense of humour, affectionate, thoughtful, and has mad skills in the bedroom. He wears his heart on his sleeve, holding nothing back from the people he cares about, and I just adored him. And Giana is a great heroine, sweet and relatable (a lover of romance novels!), with a nerdy quirkiness that is so endearing. She owns who she is, and though she’s shy and introverted, she’s confident and taking charge of her life, and I loved her.

She watched me like I had all the answers, like I was her lifeline. Like she trusted me with everything that she was.

The change between them happens naturally and honestly. They don’t hide it, they are so freaking sweet about it, and they openly and eagerly dive on in to a relationship that is emotional and sexy, and still with the playfulness that makes things between them so fun and easy.

“This isn’t fake,” he swore against my skin, kissing and nipping it along the way. “Nothing between us has ever been fake.” His mouth was on mine in the next breath, and then I was being carried through my apartment.

Drama comes, and it’s not unexpected. It brings the feels, and really puts Clay and Giana to the test. This is usually the part of the story that can make or break a book for me, but it’s so well written, realistic and with just the right amount of angst, and my heart ached for both of them and all that they go through. I loved watching them work through it, and thought it was handled really well.

Having said that though, I would have loved just a little bit more. I wanted some more closure on some of the side storylines, and would have loved to have seen just a bit more of these two after all of the drama. But I’m sure we’ll see more of them in the next book, and after that glimpse in the epilogue, I’m excited for Holden’s book coming up next.

Believe it or not, this is my first Kandi Steiner book (I know… where I have been, right?). I love her writing, the way she combined humour with feels and gave us such a realistic and beautiful love story, and I’m excited to read more of her work.

Loved this one – 4.5 stars!

 

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