Eli and Nala first meet in the hospital, he is doing charity work and she is visiting her friends daughter. These two characters are giving, thoughtful, and work-a-holics, but they both need each other's help to fulfill family obligations. Eli needs a fake girlfriend to take to a cousins' wedding so his family won't try to set him up, and she needs to fulfill all the items on a bucket list she wrote in college. If Nala is able to fulfill all the items her grandmother will allow her to create dresses for special needs kids, which is something she does on the side.

When Eli and Nala begin spending more time together their chemistry is off the charts, everyone around them can see it and as a reader you can see explode right off the page. They allow each other to relax and, she experiences things she never would have without his help. You will need a few tissues as well, for happy/sweet tears, but this book is well worth the read and the happy feels it gives you.

When a fake date becomes real love!

Dress designer Nala Johnson is a workaholic, and her passion has been making dresses for girls with challenges but only way her grandmother and the company would fund the clothing line was by finishing her bucket list she made in college. Slight problem, one of them was a date with a hot hockey player and to find a husband and she wasn’t even dating anybody!

Hockey player Eli Lawson needed a fake date to get his family off his back for his cousin’s wedding so when Nala’s friends bought her a date at a charity auction, he thought that maybe they could help each other. Just what could go wrong with pretending to date while finding Nala a husband?

Decidedly with Wishes is a fun and entertaining romance where Nala is a fish out of water trying the items on her bucket list!

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

It was a cute read. A different take on the circumstance of the main character Nala being a“fake girlfriend.” As someone who works within a population of special needs kids I greatly appreciated the attention to detail the author put in to represent sensory processing disorders. They were quite accurate. I liked the characterization of Eli and his insecurities. The ending was just a bit rushed which is why I put only 4 stars.