What’s it About? The Manley brothers, Sean, Bryan, and Liam try and teach their little sister Mac why she shouldn’t play high stakes card games with them but end up getting their butts handed to them instead. Their forfeit? Each brother must work for free at their sister’s cleaning service for a month. Entrepreneur Sean Manley was all set to buy a mansion and turn it into a luxury resort when he ends up working as a maid inside the mansion and finds out the owner has died and left it to her estranged granddaughter Livvy if she can solve a series of odd riddles and puzzles. In short, Sean’s plans soon get complicated when he’s torn between talking Livvy into keeping the mansion or talking her into selling it to him.


Overall reaction to the story? I spent the entire book waiting for a grand romance to happen and it just, didn’t. What a Woman Wants definitely sounds like a hot, sexy read but in reality it was more sugar, no spice, and too much of nothing important going on.


I enjoyed the set up, it was a crazy one but it was just crazy enough to be believable. I know I bought it. I liked Sean and most of the time I liked Livvy but I didn’t fall in love with them and to me they were a little wooden as far as characters go. To me Livvy was more scatterbrained child than quirky adult and I think that’s what kept me from really liking her. I loved that she came with a whole host of animals that gave Sean a hard time. Livvy’s love of animals was her saving grace for me, otherwise I would have labeled her a TSTL character. She was too child like in her behavior for most of the book. Sean was a little better though. I loved the conflict he was faced with because it brought out all sorts of sides to him that probably wouldn’t have surfaced in any other situation. He was definitely more than just a pretty face. He did have a condition that I wish had been discussed and used more in the plot because it’s a pretty big one, but instead it was glossed over like it was nothing more than a hair out of place. That could have made for a more interesting plot device.


As far as the romance go, I wasn’t feeling it either. There was waaay too much internal dialogue going on that slowed down the pace and bored me. It annoyed me how many times Sean and/or Livvy would drift off into their own minds while supposedly having conversations with each other. How did these two get to know one another if all they did was zone out almost every time they were together? I wanted more actual interaction and less internal dialogue. And that internal dialogue was usually how attracted they were to the other so I was expecting some real fireworks between them but guess what? Zip. Zilch. Nada. With all that prelude and buildup that was a very disappointing aspect of the romance. Then again, had I known that What a Woman Wants was more sweet than spicy with too much internal dialogue, I would have passed on it altogether.


And while I LOVE animals in romance, I do feel like the author put too much of them into a romance between two humans. That’s saying something because I usually love it when there are animals involved but many of the scenes with them did nothing to further the plot or provide anything useful. The first couple of scenes were funny, especially when it came to Livvy’s silly parrot but after a while it was just too much.


Click It or Skip It? Skip It. To me there was too much of nothing going on and not enough work on the characters’ relationship. I could overlook it being too sweet but the rest not so much. It took me forever to finish this book.