How do you lead two double lives at once? Lex is a security consultant/bodyguard who is hired to protect billionaire Michael. Michael thinks that she is an escort pretending to be his girlfriend so the wife of an important ambassador stops flirting with and harassing him. Lex has to pretend to be a pretend girlfriend as she pretends to be an escort, and continue carrying out her mission as a guard. What she doesn’t expect to have to do is to pretend to not have feelings for Michael as the chemistry between the two grows stronger and stronger.
I came into this story looking for a strong romantic connection between two characters who are simply trying to do their jobs in a complex situation. I wanted Michael and Lex to clumsily fall in love as he tries to complete this business deal and she tries to keep him alive. I did get some of that in this story, but what I didn’t expect was how much the characters seemed to be unfit for one another at some points.
Michael seems to be nice some of the time, but other times he just insults Lex for seemingly no reason. He states that he can see the hurt in her eyes when he says those things, but he never thinks to stop saying those things. I never truly understood how the two could have steamy scenes filled with chemistry, bu then Michael would be insulting Lex in the next one. The book eventually tries to give an explanation for his rudeness, but it just didn’t make sense to me. I could not understand how the two would be able to fall for each other under these circumstances.
I absolutely loved the parts of the story that didn’t focus on romance. I’m a sucker for secret agent/spy stories, and that is what this story felt like despite it being labeled as a billionaire/bodyguard romance. The action scenes were well written, and I could see that Lex would have been perfect for Michael as she was such a capable guard and even worked well as a socialite (albeit a fake one). The story spent a lot of time on the negotiations of this deal and how the different characters played a role. I didn’t connect with the other characters besides Lex and Michael much, but this didn’t make me feel bad as the story was short so the other people didn’t matter in the grand scheme of the story.
Overall, this book works well as a secret agent/bodyguard story, but it falls a bit flat on the romance sections. I could sort of get behind the couple by the end of the story, but I couldn’t understand how their chemistry worked at the beginning. I can’t recommend this as a romance novel, but I could recommend it as a secret agent/bodyguard action novel.
I received a copy of this book and this is my voluntary review.
Overall Rating: 2.5 out of 5 books
