What I liked: the sexy lessons trope and Welsh accents in the audiobook.

But.. rant incoming 🙈

This was not enemies to lovers!! And having the E2L thing repeatedly shoehorned-in ruined the story.

There wasn’t one moment where these MCs weren’t nice to each other. Vague allusions to a feud between their families (when actually they all hang out on the reg) does not an enemies to lovers story make.

This was childhood friends to friends with benefits to lovers, and nothing to do with enemies. What kept them apart was him thinking she wouldn’t make a good wife for his planned future (despite thinking she’s “the only woman he’d ever truly wanted”). And her not wanting to be with any man, ever, due to a disastrous encounter.

The transition to romantic feelings happened before the book began, which isn’t my fav. And, the heroine had ILY thoughts before the sexy bargain started, which isn’t how I like to see this trope play out.

Having the heroine propose “enemies with benefits” in the bargain convo while privately thinking, “she’d had feelings for him for years,” didn’t magically turn this into an E2L story. I wish we’d ridden the longing train through FriendsWithBenefitsVille to Pinetown. But the story was too busy insisting they were enemies to emphasize their years of longing.

Plus these characters were messy. For example, our heroine’s main personality trait was her interest in animal welfare. Yet, she routinely wore exotic animals and, more illogically, we’d get a scene like this: she liked her rescued peacock and was admonishing someone for joking about peacock pie… and then pulled out her peacock feather fan—harvested from a bunch of dead peacocks (!)—and joked about threatening her pet with it... Calm down, Cruella.

The story just didn’t hang together well enough for me. Too much Telling, too little romance.