Mills & Boon, £3.49, ISBN 978-0-263-90827-5
Contemporary Romance, 2014

Jennifer Hayward writes with a bouncy kind of verve that often makes her feel out of place in the Modern line, which sees her peers dishing out the most over the top tropes associated with the line with either suspiciously self-mocking kind of wryness or misplaced gravity. The author instead serves bubbly dialogues that would be more at home in a romantic comedy or chick-lit.

Nonetheless, the Modern tropes are present, but since An Exquisite Challenge is one of her earliest Modern stories, the author hasn’t been wholly browbeaten yet into being like the other Modern authors. Think of it as a honey trap: it may lure unsuspecting people into believing that other Modern books are just like this one, and by the time they realize they are wrong, oops, they are already addicted to the tropes and there is no escape.

Gabe De Campo comes from a wealthy family that make their fortune on the back on generations of alcoholics. Wait, that’s unfair, as the smelly and uncouth kind of alcoholics will never be able to afford the De Campo Group’s goodies.

Anyway, there is some kind of great launch that will shake the whole alcoholic industry, except that he has fired the PR agency responsible for organizing the launch. It’s not that our hero is a secret teetotaler wanting to sabotage his family business and eventually turn it into an exclusive soy latte manufacturer—their motto could be “Starbucks, sure, but are they a trillion bucks?!!”—he’s just being his usual entitled billionaire self.

Oh hush, you. He’s a hot billionaire, so he can do whatever he wants as long as he’s also doing us and giving us free access to his bank account, so there.

Katya Jones, our heroine’s friend, also works with Gabe, and she hires our heroine Alexandra Anderson to step in, even when Gabe already makes it clear that he doesn’t do business with family members.

No, no, don’t get too excited, as she’s not the flower in his attic. She’s an in-law, alright, and that counts as family to him.

So yes, the rest of the story goes on as mostly expected.

Reading this one really makes the author stand out as a sore thumb among her peers. It’s a lovely kind of sore thumb, though, because Alex is an adorable heroine that could still make Modern readers expecting the typical heroine of that line to have an aneurysm: she’s had sex with men other than Gabe, and she doesn’t beat herself too much about that. She’s also actually capable.

Sure, she has the usual “I need Gabe as a client or my PR business will go under!” anchor that ties her to Gabe no matter what, but her circumstance is because of a corporate shuffle on the former client’s end and not because she thinks one plus one gives three because oh my god, she really wants to have a baby by having sex with the hero like, yesterday.

Gabe may talk and act like a hero in a romantic comedy or chick-lit, but he’s a Modern hero through and through, although fortunately he shows off his bell end of a rear end only late in the story for the obligatory “How dare you are not pure and clean? You are a ho!” drama necessary for the heroine to pass the hero’s purity test.

Now, I’m not entirely devoid of empathy for Gabe in this situation, as Alex’s baggage can affect his business, but it’s odd how he is so mad in this instance when his initial attitude in this story was a “Oh, I’m screwing over my own company’s big launch in three weeks because… whatever!” kind of blasé. It’s as if the author was having him act the way he does for plot purposes, or more specifically, for “I need drama for the story’s late end!” purpose, hmm.

Also, Alex should have told him. I’m not sure how she thinks she can keep things a secret, considering how incestuously small the wine industry can be. Still, she could have said her personal life is her own business and Gabe could sod off with his attitude.

Then again, the author also conveniently makes it that Alex desperately needs Gabe as a client, so it’s not like Alex can tell that man to bugger himself with the business end of a rake. Yup, this is definitely a Modern story in its core!

The weak-ass drama late in the story does a good job in making me give the two main characters and the author my side eye. Still, up to that point this one had been a pretty entertaining, bouncy read with characters that for the most part play one another off nicely, have chemistry, and behave in sane and likable ways that are often anathema to the Modern line.

All in all, it’s a pretty fun read, although I wish I’d stopped reading before that last minute unnecessary drama.