Love Under Contract by Cassie Connor

Goodreads Synopsis

When you can’t find the perfect date for the holidays you hire him!

Hotshot lawyer Rebecca Madison is dreading the annual family Thanksgiving break where the question on everyone’s lips will be ‘why are you still single?’.

When it comes to her career, she’s the best of the best, hired for her take-no-prisoners approach and sharp instincts. But when it comes to her love life…well, she hasn’t found the loophole for happy ever after yet.

So when she has a one night stand with a gorgeous stranger she meets in a bar, Becca decides to do what she does best: make a deal with Mr One Night to be her Mr Right (just for the holidays).

With an iron-clad contract setting out the terms for their fake relationship, Becca has one important point. Clause 1.a. No kissing, no sex (as mind-blowing as it was), and absolutely no emotional attachment!

But five thousand miles from home and spending every waking moment in the company of a man who makes her feel things she’s never felt before, just how easy will it be for Becca to stick to her own rules…

Rating

Review

I requested this book over NetGalley and One More Chapter approved the request. The thing that attracted me to the book first was the cover and then when I read the synopsis, I so wanted to read it because fake dating to real love has always been one of my favourite romance tropes.

I wish I had clicked some photos but I was so engrossed in the story that I just could not bring myself to put the kindle down and go for the photo session. But, as soon as I had finished reading it, I wanted to share what I thought about it.

First, the characters.

Our female lead, Rebecca, is fierce in what she does and has high expectations of herself as she works towards achieving her ambitions. The pull to this character for me lies in the similarities between Rebecca and I. Like me, she is ambitious and had made her career her thing. Her top most priority. That does not mean that she does not take anything else into account or something but she is an exacting master.

Our male lead, Hudson, on the other hand has a lot of similarities with my husband. Like my husband is one the very few people who are not intimated by me or my ambitions, Hudson is not intimated by his Beccs’ high ambitions. He is supportive of her goals in life, standing by her as she goes up the corporate ladder while he keeps to his own pace and it is never a competition.

I love the fact that there is a reversal in the character psyche and the heroine is a commitment phobe rather than the hero. The hero is all fun and ready to take the plunge but the woman here is the cynic. I am not saying that it is a good thing to be a cynic but it plays very well into the story.

For the fake dating trope, it was done very well. The hiring of the contractor was very professionally done.😂

I have read many a fake dating romance but this was a new angle that I read in this one. A contract and the legality of it all made it hilarious and the same kept tying the characters in knots because what if they did something that was not part of the contract and that they were in breach of the contract.

The story is paced a little faster than moderate and the characters – even other than the leads – make their place and hold it because they are all integral to not just the development of the story but the development of the main characters as well. All of them help the two realise what they will miss out on if they let each other go.

It had been some time since I had read a romance that I could characterise as hot but this one was off the charts. The hotness and sexiness of those scenes did not make me feel that those scenes were written just for the sake of including sex scenes or to blacken the page. The scenes fit in with the overall story and kind of helped in character development as well.

Lastly, I’d like to say that while I am not a fan of stories written in the first person narrative but this story being written in first person narrative was not a deterrent for me at all. In fact, the moment I started reading it, I had a hard time putting my kindle down.

A 5 star book that I highly recommend to all romance readers.

Ciao