I had a bad moment about 10% of the way into reading this book when what I call my 'Christian Grey radar' went off. (For the record, I'm in the '50 Shades of Creepy Abusive Stalker' camp.)
The heroine, Charlotte, proposes an affair to the hero, Brooks. She's a (minor) princess, he's a social-media-famous journalist she already knows is a chronic over-sharer. Her only pre-condition for the affair is that he must not share 'intimate' ie. nude, photos of her.
His response? To state conditions of his own.
"First, you will make yourself available to me at any time."
That is some Christian Grey level shit right there, and I'll be honest, I put the book down and didn't get back to it until the following day. I figured I'd give it another chance and luckily, it didn't descend to the complete pits of awful I feared. The hero had a couple more moments of complete despicability (is that a word? hell with it, it is now) such as when he said
"It's in your DNA to fuck anything that will let you."
This, when he's well aware that he's only the second guy she's ever had sex with. And the woman is twenty-seven. That's some twisted logic right there.
I couldn't warm to Brooks. Charlotte was a sweetheart and she deserved so much better. The writing style of the book was OK; I'm not a big fan of the alternating first person style of writing and there were a few incorrect word choice issues like trestle instead of trellis, site instead of sight, grizzly instead of grisly... you can only call a death grizzly if the victim was ACTUALLY eaten by a bear, OK?
The other issue I had with the book is that most of the time, I had no idea what was going on. This is the second in a series and there really isn't enough information about what happened in the previous book to make the plot make sense... and considering how much I disliked this one, there's no way I'm going to read the first.
Two stars.
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book for review through NetGalley.