Claire Marti, $2.99, ISBN 978-1-7333046-6-5
Contemporary Romance, 2020
Rafael “Mr Perfect” Cruz and Phoebe “Ice Queen” Hollingsworth are colleagues at Trident Wealth Consultants. and they can’t stand one another. Naturally, their boss pairs them to go get a pair of potential new clients to sign the dotted line of a lucrative contract.
The boss Clifford J MacDonald warns them to put on a cheery, united front before those people, and since he’s about to retire, those two are ambitious enough to nod and play along in case they get… nice things… after that old man steps down from the throne.
Claire Marti’s Wrapped Up With You does many things right. It is will be easy to put the heroine in a position of weakness to make the story appear “more romantic”, but here, Phoebe dishes out as good as she gets, and Rafe is as flustered and aroused by their barbs and hisses as she is.
The banter and barbs are well done, amusing without being too overtly hostile or toxic, and the chemistry between the two leads is there.
Furthermore, many similarly stories would see the heroine resigning or fleeing for some reason, so that the hero will win and thus be seen as the winner—I don’t know why, I can only guess that it’s romantic only when the hero is clearly superior to the heroine intellectually and everything else-ly. No such thing here, which is nice, as the heroine and the hero are playing footsie on an equal playing field.
However, this story is too “big” for a story of this short length. These two fall into bed way too quickly, and they then go from frenemies to boinking partners in crime in a pace that is too fast for me to find believable. The whole thing takes place way too quickly in too short a time, and I’m never more aware of the forced, artificial constraints of the short story format because of this.
Also, because of the rushed pace of the story, I have a hard time buying these two are capable enough to run a company together… oh wait, now that I think about it, were this real life, this is probably the realest aspect of this story. How many actually competent bosses in a corporate environment do you know? See what I mean?
So, all things considered, this a fun, quick read, but it’s not the most well put together romance at the same time. For what it is, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing so long as one isn’t expecting too much when going into it.
