A perfect free-with-the-newsletter holiday novella? This book was so freaking good!

… Just a sweetheart heroine hiding in the library at a ball, oops the hot rake is also in there, oops they kiss… and then BAM. 

This book became a story I did not expect at all.

Rather than list tropes or plot things (because I want you to be as taken off guard by then as I was), I want to speculate on some of this book’s secret sauce ingredients….
❄️ A hero who was a Capital-R Rake, aka kind of a bastard. He was malicious, vain, a sulky baby, selfish… the list goes on and on. And the deeper a hole he dug for himself, he more gleeful I became. It made his rake reformation arc DELICIOUS. And it made his grovel scrum-diddly-umptious.
❄️ Sunshine-y dreamer heroines can sometimes be written as if they don’t have a flaw, and therefore be cheated out of a character arc. But not this heroine. We kind of put her through it, and I was obsessed.
❄️ There was some particularly compelling ‘get him/her out of my system’ delusion.
❄️ And this was way hotter than I expected!

Also, the man read Persuasion by Jane Austen and identified with the way Captain Wentworth thought about the Asp (his first ship). Which is a reference that I can’t stop thinking about 😆