She trusted him with her heart—he turned it into intel.
Dom Delacour is a covert operative on a high-stakes assignment to expose a powerful diplomat suspected of colluding with foreign agents. After recon, he decides the quickest way in is to seduce the man’s overlooked, soft-spoken daughter, Enya Cahill.
For Dom, this is supposed to be a means to an end and nothing more. But Enya isn’t what he expected. She’s sweet, kind, and hopeful. And what starts as a cover becomes real…until Enya learns the truth.
Heartbroken and humiliated, Enya decides to raise her surprise pregnancy without the man who deceived her. Dom refuses to let her do that, not when he’s finally admitted to himself that he’s in love with her.
To win Enya back, he’ll have to burn every bridge, even the agency he serves…
Dominic is part of Regretfully Yours, an angst-filled short story series about heartbreak, redemption, and groveling heroes who fight for their happily ever after.
This author is a hit or miss for me. Usually a miss, but I keep reading them because I’m an angst whore and this woman can deliver some serious angst. Unfortunately, her fmc’s are typically doormats and it drives me batty.
I’ve really liked this short story series by Maya. It’s collectively my favorite work by her. This one was pretty good, but probably my least favorite one.
Spoilery thoughts…
At 25% I was close to a DNF. In the beginning the FMC is quite the doormat and I was getting annoyed. Fortunately, she turns it around and I’m glad I persevered. At one point she goes to lunch with her bitchy sister and serves her a ‘give no f’s attitude’. It was pretty awesome.
The MMC was a bastard for his original betrayal. But by the end I got over it. I mean a spy is going to spy. That was literally his job. National security and all. It sucked but he was genuinely smitten and felt awful. I also appreciated that he quit and changed his life for her before knowing about the baby. His grovel worked for me.
It did end incredibly abruptly. I would have liked a final smack down with the wanna be OW and her awful family. An epilogue would have been appreciated, but alas i guess that’s what you get with a Maya-style short story.
I just don’t like this author’s work. She has dozens of books and I’ve read maybe a quarter of them and started but DNF’d quite a few more. She has great chops for betrayals and the ones I’ve completed are usually the ones where the betrayal is right at the beginning. So I finish them to see what happens but I’m usually left unsatisfied.
This one I can’t even categorize. The book starts off with the FMC’s sister revealing that the MMC was a secret NSA agent but it reads like it all happened past tense. Maybe because we don’t she their relationship before he ghosts the FMC in any part of the book except a couple of lines he uttered during past sex they had in the FMC’s thoughts. Idk.
Either way, the entire book is surface level emotion wise. We are told the FMC cries for one day and then goes about her life supposedly heartbroken. But she’s working and doing family functions like a sad little puppet, but still doing it nonetheless. Then she realizes she’s pregnant and she just embraces that with no real horror at her situation, being pregnant by someone she doesn’t know the real name of or being a single mother in a family that regards image over support and love. Nothing. Not a single blip of concern for anything.
Then conveniently the MMC wants the FMC back and sacrifices his career and gets a job that sounds like he would hate up until a small part towards the end when he was excited about a meeting over decisions for all the little people who don’t get to be “in the rooms where it happens”. Smdh.
Basically he shows up and bulldozes his way into the FMC’s life and that’s all that happens in this book. BBS, convenient pregnancy and bulldozing, what a romance, smh. It was okay for how shallow and short and lacking any real character growth that it was.
Also, the actual story ends at the 65% mark. The rest is filler for all the other work by this author. 35% of wasted page time that I paid for. Didn’t authors used to get banned for this on Amazon years ago?? Not only that, you have to hunt down a bonus chapter on this author’s website to see the characters a few years down the road. I hate it but did it and it was just pointless fluff that could have been in the book that I PAID FOR. Just saying.
Anyway I always end up feeling like I wasted my time with this author’s books.
One other gripe I have with this author is that her characters whine and moan about how horrible their families have treated them and how miserable there lives are with them in it but she almost never gives any of them any comeuppance or cuts them out of the main characters lives. They are almost always still there just muted or low contact. Like what is the point? The main characters find love and they have each other against the world? That’s the answer to everything?? No it’s not and it’s not realistic to stay with toxic people in your life like they won’t infect your relationship. I find everything this author writes leaves a frustrating lack of resolution to her stories.
Read at your own risk. Doormat MFL and obnoxious alphahole MML
DNF. Enya is a doormat and Nick/Dominic is an obnoxious alphahole who bulldozes his way back into Enya's life.
I'm not sure why contemporary authors insist on writing horrible betrayals and with one dimensional characters and have cliche doormat weak female leads. Internalized misogyny runs deeps with this author.
This woman was forced into Stockholm Syndrome, and the man was totally fine with it. This entire story gave me the ick. Absolutely no redeeming qualities about Dom. Yuck.
We don’t get the build up to the betrayal. He’s an NSA agent investigating her diplomat father. He goes above and beyond in his investigation and they both fall in love. The story starts after the investigation is finished.
He’s in love. She’s hurt, in love and pregnant. They have semi-interfering families, his family is supportive, her’s is interfering and try to control the narrative..
This was an ok quick read. Some characters from previous books featured. Dominic is an undercover special agent who forms a relationship with Enya in order to investigate her father. The betrayal is huge, he sleeps with her and claims to love her just to get information about her father. She finds out from her sister that he was an agent and the whole relationship was fake, he doesn’t even explain it to her. She then discovers she is pregnant. He decides he loves her and turns up at her florist shop and starts to visit daily to try and win her over. She just lets him move into her life and forgives so easily. No angst, he doesn’t suffer for his betrayal. Although he gives up his job it’s not really for her, he was discontented anyway after being shot a year earlier. He also immediately gets another high profile role, so no hardship caused by his resignation. It’s not ok to lie to someone for 6 months, to use them and manipulate them. This book needed real resistance from Enya, Dominic needed to feel the pain he had caused and there should have been much more grovelling. Enya was a pushover and needed some backbone. It was readable but forgettable.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
The kind of grovel where the FMC’s wishes are ignored as the MMC pushes his agenda for “love”
I hated it.
I wish he’d felt even a minute amount of the pain she did at his betrayal. Instead, he seemed to be having the time of his life ignoring her boundaries and relying on hormones to get that body betrayal syndrome.
I was excited for the next story , and while the story is ok, there was nothing new, with the story following the predictable framework and felt shallow filled with missed opportunities to give it greater substance.
If you are hoping for a FMC with some backbone who stands up to the pushy MMC then you are in for disappointment. Limited groveling, despite the lies and betrayal he is forgiven without any effort on his part, bulldozing over the pregnant FMC to get his own way. A repetitive storyline, so similar to the other mills and boon approach stories by this author is writing in another series. Annoying things throughout the book - the MMC continues to use his fame alias even after be is outed as an agent, the side story of the sister that is important enough to get its own chapter but goes nowhere, just a brief sentence to reference at the end of the book.
Perhaps I’m just over weak women rolling over with a few nice words and forgiving and creating a HEA despite admitting no trust. I need better groveling and FMC who really make them work for forgiveness and trust. (Think Rose and Gray from a Kiss from a Rose)
It started off well. The Hero and his bud seem to be the type that regularly sleep with their mark. Other woman drama with colleague who he used to also hook up with. No intimate details except h/H
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
This was ok for a quick read. It did end at 66% on my kindle which was diabolical.
I actually love the trope of an undercover agent working a heroine for a case and falling in love for real. Unfortunately I didn’t feel the angst as much as I wanted, and because it was a short story there wasn’t as much grovel or emotional build up as I wanted.
This wasn't your typical romance story. It's short so a quick read. Nick (Dominic) and Enya. Nick is undercover and initially gets close to Enya to get close to her father but he goes and falls for her. The books starts off once they both know he has deceived her so we don't see the development of their relationship. I wasn't sure how Nick was going to earn her forgiveness given the circumstances under which they met but he did and it worked. Another enjoyable and quick read.
I know it's a novella, but it felt like it started in the middle of the situation. You didn't get a good glimpse of how things were before they imploded. I also didn't care for Dominic, though I know he tried very hard to take care of Enya. I just felt he did what everyone else did and that was railroad. I know he loved her, but I didn't feel the grovel and she caved pretty quick. Though I know months went by and he wore her down, the writing didn't make you feel that way. It was... it's now x amount of time later and the growth of the characters felt forced. Especially Enya... she was the one with the least growth IMO. She grew a spine for all of 5 minutes and then Dominic just kinda took over. Not Maya's best by any means. Nonetheless, I will continue to read her books... most of them are really quite good, though her FMC's tend to be a little too forgiving or the other extreme where you just want to shout GIVE IN ALREADY. This author needs to find a happy medium with her female characters. I don't mind the OTT alpha male... but I would be happier with a stronger female character.
The 4th in the series, as the heroes are alphabetically named, and this one was actually pretty good. This author writes horrible heroes and doormat heroines. This time there was a bit of difference in her usual style.
The h is definitely an introvert in my opinion, or maybe she just doesn’t like being noticed. The MMC turns out to be an agent with the NSA and his team is after her father. Her father is not the one selling intelligence and the team discovers the actual source. The MMC lies to her and disappears.
She is told, by her sister, that the MMC is an agent, which she clearly didn’t know. So she’s heartbroken because she thought he actually loved her.
And it turns out, he does!
Better than most of her books. This one I can recommend.
It stops at 66%! I wanted more. Way more. Nick was a great hero. He really did love her and yes,he messed up at first but he made it right. He always wanted her. I cried a little when her sister told her that he was just using her and she just broke. And then at the interrogation. She tried to be so tough. But he definitely Italy loved her. I liked how he just moved in without asking her. That was funny. then the way he talked to the baby . it was so cute. A bad guy comes for her to get to Nick but she basically saves herself. Nick does an assist though!! Lol. Then the baby and its just over!!! More please!
Dom is use to doing whatever he needs to in order to get the job done but that all changes when he falls in love with his latest mark he is unsure what to do with these feelings. He makes life changes moves to prove that she is all that he wants but it's going to be hard. When her father sets her up and Dom is able to corner her at an event and she is upset. When he won't leave her alone and she blurts out that she is pregnant it stamps that he is not letting her go. Its take the help of his family, her friends, and his persistence to get her to take him back even with all the twist that life throws in the mix.
It was ok. I was actually a bit bored towards the end. I didn’t know where it was going as there was 80 pages left, then it ended! The rest of the book was excerpts from future stories.
3 🌟 for this little morsel of a short story. There’s betrayal but I didn’t particularly feel it since the story launches after the betrayal happened. Most of the book is about repair. Not bad. The MMC isn’t as much of a dick as MA’s MMCs usually are!
She thinks he is going to Paris on business and that he will surprise her with an engagement ring. She loves him and he seems ott in love with her as well. But Nick Smith is not her dream man, he isn’t even Nick Smith, he is Dominic Delacroix, a secret agent man. And Enya? She was just another job, a means to an end. Or at least that is what he thought….it seems that Nick/Dominic is not so sure anymore. However, it may be too late to fix what he has broken.
Enya Cahill, finds out via her nasty sister, that Nick Smith works for the NSA and he entered a relationship with Enya to get closer to her dad. They thought the Dad was dirty and needed all the dirt. Come to find out the dad, although a terrible father, was not involved in anything illegal.
Enya gets called in to the NSA office to be debriefed. She handles it like a queen. On the other side of the glass is Dominic watching and wanting. Kiera a fellow agent and on again off again pillow buddy when they want to blow off steam, tries to comfort Dom and he shuts her down. He begins to question for the first time if being a perpetual bachelor is something he still wants to do. It works for his job, but maybe this isn’t the job for him either anymore.
Since this is a novella I won’t give away too much more. However, I will give a few highlights. - Dominic realizes very quickly that he loves Enya. He changes his life just to have a chance to win her back. And yes he makes this decision before he is aware that there is a baby - Enya doesn’t give in right away, she makes Dominic work for the right to love her again and boy is it fun to watch him work! - Supporting characters: - *Bff Cass - *Daisy(Dom’s sister) and her husband Forest(they have their own story in Not a Love Marriage) - Ow (Kiera)…who doesn’t want to take no for an answer and has to be shutdown more than once - Daddy Cahill and sister Cahill…not supportive of Enya at all unless he gets them more connections and influence, Enya has little to do with them and Dom her protector won’t let them hurt her Maya Alden excels at packing a whole lot of story with less word count. Even though things move quickly, you never have the feeling that you are missing out on something! I loved Enya’s spark and resistance to taking Nick/Dom back immediately. I loved Dom’s alpha caring ways to win back his woman(from learning flower arranging to reading what to expect when you are expecting). I actually was not upset with him for very long, because he was just doing a job. What makes this a beautiful love story is he was a man who never planned on getting married and doing the whole kid thing! His life was mapped out! Then Enya happened and a life full of intrigue was nothing compared to waking up next to her! We get many moments of humor throughout. This really was a sweet story with a woman who hasn’t had much luck with people in her corner, to the alpha male who isn’t just in her corner but takes up all her space. I can’t wait til we get the next novella Evan.