Irish Ink Publishing, $0.99, ISBN 979-8215376102
Contemporary Romance, 2020

Alright, Drew Duncan’s Because I Need You is very reliant on the reader’s tolerance threshold for toxic asshole bosses. 

I remembered one girl about six months ago who had come into the group to post about him. Her grandmother had died, and she had needed a few days off to help with the funeral arrangements and the funeral itself. He had started with an email and text here and there to ask her about the work he expected her to be doing at home while grieving. Apparently, by the time her grandmother’s funeral arrived, he was calling her five or six times an hour and went ape shit when she didn’t answer while she had been in church for the service. Poor girl quit the next day. Liz told me off the record that he had called her to see if she would fire the girl anyway because he ‘found her level of tardy completely unacceptable in a professional capacity’. Without a doubt, Aiden Munroe was a top-class knob.

The thing here is that Aiden is not misunderstood by others. He is a horrid person, and he knows it—even revels in it. I suppose I’m to give him a pass and go “Ooh! I bet he can be fixed!” because he’s hot and rich, but I’m sure some readers may experience instead flashbacks to their real life asshole bosses and drop this thing like a hot lump of coal, especially when Aiden isn’t going to get eviscerated or mowed down by a steam roller at any time soon.

Then again, maybe poor Aiden is just vexed by all those useless female PAs that would otherwise be celebrated as cute and sassy in other PA-boss romances. Too bad, he’s into guys so he’s not finding those ladies cute and sassy.

The author tries to soften the situation by making Aiden being in the right most of the time, as he is surrounded by imbeciles, embezzlers, and more, but come on, this only demonstrates that he should fire the HR people too. He’s still an asshole.

Meanwhile, Ellis Baxter is a guy, so fortunately, he doesn’t have to trip or act like an imbecile to be considered sassy and cute. He spends the entire story treated like crap by Aiden, and yet somehow he… loves that guy?

I don’t know why, because much of the romance, or whatever that is supposed to be, is narrated from Aiden’s point of view, and unfortunately, I am subjected to him treating everyone around him like crap, feeling remorseful a little, going back to the person he’d treated like crap, losing it and treating that person like crap all over again, repeat and rinse.

The author’s narrative style is clean and very easy to read, but wow, this story is hard on my nerves because I don’t have much patience for Aiden’s antics as they become repetitive and tedious fast. Perhaps a little bit more could have been done to soften this moron a little bit?

At any rate, I don’t find the romance engaging or plausible. If anything, this thing is a testament as to how people are willing to overlook a lot of crap from an asshole if said asshole is hot and rich. That’s probably a little too much of a depressing kind of realism than I’d have liked to encounter in a romantic story!