I liked this way better than I expected?? I almost gave it five stars.. but we’ll get into it.

Going through Shupe’s backlist, I’ve been a bit scared off by this one. The average rating isn’t the best..

And I get it, the premise was a messy one: in love with a man her father disapproved of, Lady Honora was shipped off to Gilded Age New York. Her plan: to act so scandalously that her father brought her back. So obviously, she arranged a fake engagement with an American scoundrel… oh yeah, but that scoundrel was the hero of this book soo… she ended up with him instead 👀

Lots of emotional cheating on the British guy with the American guy. Now, I personally loved the messiness of it 😆 I appreciated how introspective our heroine was, how open these two MCs were with one another… but mostly, I loved how we just let her be a cheating bastard for a bit there.

And there was a moment where I was like: oh shoot, this is five stars. It was a reveal about the British guy that I thought was so ballsy and messy—one that I never see with this kind of Other Man romance plot. But then the ending walked it back a bit 😭 So I had to drop it down.

But all my other Shupe favs were there: the New York setting, complex and morally grey side characters, MCs acting badly and regretting it, and a romance plot that made me sweat a bit.

Plus, the audiobook was read by the incomparable Mary Jane Wells, so loved that.