This is the first Sara Cate I've read all the way through and it was...okay? But also second-hand embarrassing with some things that were a bit too much for my own personal tastes. While I can appreciate seeing the spurned ex-lover of the younger woman who ended up with his dad getting an HEA, having it brought up a lot and having the main character then having to sit through an engagement party, wedding, etc just started to make me go eeeeeek, and banging it out with his father's business partner too boot, whelp. YMMV, but that's all too much for me and took me out of enjoying the heat/romance a few too many times. Also there's a moment involving a safe-word that the heroine hears used by said dad & ex-girlfriend and then she incorporates it into their play and NO NO NO nope. Thankfully he never figured that out.

In the first half of the story, the heroine has a lot of internal squick regarding her sex club, the app she and her business created, etc. she thinks she's vanilla to the core, and has a lot of pent up repressed religious feelings about kink, which fine, but this many years into her business and friendship and involvement didn't work for me in this storyline. Both she and her love interest felt like they needed far more internal work before they could actually be together forever, especially since they are both babies in the kink world on top of their traumas/past relationships.

That said, I did appreciate the brat/domme dynamic, loved the ma'am-ing, the edging, the play. I just wish the surrounding plot worked on a deeper level for me and I question some of the rep of BDSM in this series (I am not an expert so I don't know for sure).

Content Notes: humiliation, toxic parent (mom of hero), kink shaming (countered), edging, pain play, c0ck cage, pegging, age-gap, friend's son (probably more but I didn't take detailed notes)