Overall: ⭐️⭐️
Plot/Storyline: 📖📖📖
Feels: 🦋
Emotional Depth: 💔💔💔
Sexual Tension: ⚡
Romance: 💞
Sensuality: 💋
Sex Scene Length: 🍑
Steam Scale (Number of Sex Scenes): 🔥
Humor: Some with the children
Perspective: Third person from both hero and heroine.

Should I read in order?
This is the first in Grey’s new series, Say I Do

Basic plot:
Fredericka must marry to secure her guardianship of her nieces and newphew. Wyatt must marry to secure his inheritance from his grandmother. They find each other the perfect marriage of convenience...

Give this a try if you want:
- Mostly London setting
- Marriage of convenience
- Children in the story – heroine is guardian of 3 children (2 girls and a boy, aged 5, 7 and 9. Charlie has a stutter)
- Low steam – there’s plenty of kisses but they are all very short and PG and only 1 scene that you will have to read a few times to be sure it’s an actual intimate act.

Ages:
- Heroine is 20, hero is 28

My thoughts:
This book really exhausted me in the worst way. I don’t even really want to write a review on it, so you should just read Fringe Book Reviews take on it because it is exactly what I felt!

I was really hoping I would love this one – I loved the initial set up of it. Duke must marry in 7 days?? Leading to a marriage of convenience? Yes please.

Then we get 3 children, which okay, not my favorite but I can totally have that with some great romance. But I never felt the romance between these two, or even came to like them.

This book seemed to be filled with quite a bit of miscommunications and assumption on both characters parts but especially the heroine. Then she would confront the hero on it and not even let him speak! Or explain anything! And then he would just let it go and they both just kept thinking things that were wrong about each other…

Then we have custody battle which isn’t my thing anyway – they are just so, so stressful and isn’t usually an environment that gives me lots of feels. And in this situation I felt like they both made a number of foolish decisions that of course lead to disaster. It made it an immensely frustrating book for me to read.

Also, not sure we needed the whole strange poetry plot. The hero has a hatred for poetry and the heroine loves poetry and it was just….strange? His extreme hatred for it (the trauma from his teacher, burning poetry books...It seemed extreme? Especially with everything else going on in the book it definitely wasn’t needed – the plot had plenty.) I went to think about what I know about these characters and I felt the character depth wasn’t that great but they do have this as a part of their identity…

And the hero is pretty jerky to the heroine. He tells her to do things that she shouldn’t be doing and doesn’t really listen to her in a number of parts. And the fact that he tells her to forgive her extremely toxic family members instead of protecting her from them? No. No. shudders in remembrance

Basically I didn’t like anything about this book. I actually felt angry reading it in quite a few places. I’m sure it will work for others – it wasn’t badly written or anything it just gave me the opposite of good romance feels and I’m glad to move on from it.

Content warnings:

- Heroines sister was a victim of domestic violence
- Scenes of toxic/controlling family members

Locations of kisses/intimate scenes:

Pg 69 – kiss
Pg 117 – kiss
Pg 128 – kiss
Pg 202 – kiss
PG 247 – kisses that lead to a super vague sex scene
Total pages: 304