Derian Winfield is the typical bad boi butch. Rich beyond most people’s dreams, rebellious and bored, she spends her life on the Formula One circuit holding parties, smoozing donors and picking up women – women with whom she is unfailingly polite but who mean less than an excellent bottle of scotch.

When her beloved aunt, Henrietta, collapses with heart problems, Derian drops everything to go home. She finds Henrietta’s beautiful protégé, Emily May, sat outside her hospital room and a turf war for the literary agency Henrietta and Emily adore.

Emily, orphaned by a plane crash, responsible for her non responsive older sister and now threatened by deportation, resists the charismatic jet setter with all her will, and when she succumbs knows it is extremely temporary – literally until the next race, the next casino or the next woman attracts Derian’s attention.

This is another in a line of relatively formulaic romances from Radclyffe, but I enjoyed it, and who am i to judge when so many readers adore these books. For me the romances don’t come close to the series; Provincetown, Honor, Justice and First Responders (in my personal favourite order) but I really liked the characters and found myself pulled into the story.

Derien is the typical playboy but not only charming, she has integrity and deep down, knows her life is a sham, simply a way of escaping the fact she was never good enough. Emily appears all sweetness and light, the archetypical good girl, but underneath all that goodness is a tiger waiting to be unleashed, and of course Derian is just the woman to unleash her.

Some of the background characters are a little shadowy, but Derian’s adoring best friend Aud is amusing, some of the agency staff are solid and most of all Henrietta herself is a real character, irascible yet inspiring, she is what really holds the plot and the agency together.

I was slightly confused by Emily’s history; needs a visa, comes from Singapore and yet is clearly not Asian from her description or the jacket. That and some of the other back stories, such as the feud between brother and sister Martin and Henrietta, could have done with more detail, but as with any good traditional romance, be it book or movie, we forget unimportant facts in the rush to the ‘happy ever after’ and only remember afterwards that there was something missing.

The writing is excellent, fast paced and enthralling, and I genuinely wanted it to all work out.. not that I had a moments doubt. Definitely Radclyffe at her romantic best.

Great characters, steamy story…

I’ve been reading this author’s stories for years and I love the character and story development she brings to each read. In this genre, I have often found an emphasis on the steamier scenes rather than a full, engaging read but Radclyffe finds that perfect balance…

What happens when you bring two very different people together with one goal? Magic actually. I loved the conversations between Derian and Emily. They were easy to connect with as they revealed their obvious strengths, their inner fears and their growing attraction. There was a physical component for sure and their discussions, their dialogues, were honest and even more intimate.
Career, family, needs, desires. All of it was out in the open to troubleshoot. Together.

This was a one-sitting read and reminded me why I liked this author’s stories so much. There will be a whole bunch of re-reads happening I suspect…

*I happily reviewed this story
**Thank you to NetGalley

This is the second Rad book I've read this year that's a standalone, and I find I much prefer them. This one doesn't quite match the synopsis though, judging by that I was expecting a 'The Proposal', marriage of convenience type thing, but that's not what this book is at all, although it does get a mention.

I liked both characters, and they do spend a lot of time together, and this time is spent discussing things of substance, they don't just jump into bed. I did think that some time jumps were a bit jarring, (I actually had to page back to work out how long HW had been out of hospital), and for the most part the romance is very sweet.

I loved that Emily wasn't some shy wallflower type, she wasn't wrong about being reluctant to get involved, there were good reasons not to, but she owned the fact that she wanted Dere anyway, and jumped in with both feet when it got moving.

I could have lived without the fabricated breakup nonsense, but it was short lived, so I didn't care too much. The father takeover plot and Emily's visa issues also seemed to amount to nothing, so it felt like time was wasted on them.

What I did care about was that Emily was supposed to be a POC character, as everything we're told about her background, and her visa issues would suggest, but there was nothing at all ethnic about her, she could have been a white woman from the UK for all the part her ethnicity played in the book. Rad should read Jae's Heart Trouble for a lesson on how to write a character with an actual ethnic background. If it wasn't for the repeated mentions of her sister still being in Singapore, I'd have forgotten she was from there.

Still, I enjoyed this more than I had anticipated, it's a nice sweet romance, and for once didn't come with a slew of background characters from other books that I had to keep track of. I also loved that it was set in the world of publishing. I'm giving it four stars because I enjoyed those aspects of it, but really it should get 3.5 at most for the whitewashing of the POC character.

I could not get into it but I tried. It was interesting and I read it all, but I guess maybe the story wasn't really as exciting as I anticipated.