rounded up from 4.75 ( )

I absolutely love Dan!!! ( )

Dialogue 5/5
Characters 5/5
Audiobook performance 10/5 so good
Having a man mansplain mansplaining 0/5 why would you do this

I have so been waiting for Kat and Dan’s story. Kat is the heiress to a pharmaceutical fortune, and Dan is a former felon and gang member, now security guard and business partner with Quinn. This had a really fun plot with Kat’s crazy cousin trying to take over the company and have her committed, so Kat needed to find someone to marry on the quick, finally nudging her and Dan together after years of waffling. I completely enjoyed the scenes with the crazy cousin!

I also really appreciated the note from the MC (author) towards the end about the portrayal (stigmatization) of certain diseases in books and the media. A character in this book had schizophrenia, which the author notes, accurately, is overwhelmingly portrayed in books/the media as a violent disease where sufferers attack helpless victims in a mad rage, when this is not the reality for the majority of cases, and for books/the media to continue narrowly focusing on that small percentage of cases has a harmful and misleading effect that cause sufferers of many mental health disorders to be stigmatized. The same stigmatization happens with many other misunderstood conditions, including migraine and other headache disorders, where migraine is commonly mentioned in books… but always as “Oh, sorry, I can’t go out with you, have a migraine”… the character lying about a headache to get out of doing something, stigmatization that further harms the headache community by reinforcing the idea migraine is something you lie about, causing true sufferers not to be believed by coworkers, doctors, and friends, and rarely portraying the disease accurately. Anyway, I really appreciated that Penny Reid took the time to get this right. This has been a really wonderful series. I’m so excited to continue with the Winston Brothers and whatever else she writes next.

Please excuse typos/name misspellings. Entered on screen reader. ( )

I was looking forward to this one since the romance between Kat and Dan was hinted at so many times in the previous books, but in the end I found it disappointing. The romance story was overshadowed by the CEO-trying-to-ouster-the-heiress story which I found to be boring, preposterous and unappealing. And the romance never seemed to be based on much more than lust and physical attraction. I did appreciate how the book addressed sexual anxiety since in all the other books the sex always seems to be so glorious--so at least a little touch of reality here, but not enough to save the book. ( )