this was a short romance that unfortunately got ruined a bit by my nit-picky brain that kept getting annoyed by small-ish things.
like the fact that the mafia boss hero's second-in-command ignored the boss' wishes and SHOT AT the heroine unprovoked. the hero wrestles the gun out of his hands, and then ??? does nothing about his second whose behavior was disrespectful towards the boss AND showed a disconcerting willingness to just straight up murder a woman with zero proof she's a spy. im sorry but in no fucking universe does a mafia boss actually tolerate that kind of behavior and i would've liked to have heard that he at least broke the guy's arms or something smh.
i had some other issues like the fact that the hero didn't seem very concerned with making the heroine's first time special. it wouldn't have taken any effort to just move the party to a bed instead of a hallway floor, and it wasn't really a case of "we're so caught up in this, we simply do not have five seconds to move".
before they have sex it occurs to the heroine that maybe the hero is married (he isn't btw), and then proceeds to have sex with him without asking whether he's single? yeah, that bothered me.
i wish authors would stop putting thoughts in heroines' heads without those same thoughts affecting their behavior. don't just write something for the sake of showing the heroine has cognitive function - make it go somewhere! make her act on her thoughts. that's how people work.
(also, it appears ive reached that age where a romance between an 18yo woman and a 30-ish man seems less romantic and more nightmarish... though, of course, maybe that has something to do with this specific heroine not having the fictional brainpower to even ask about the hero's marital status. or because there's something inherently predatory about a 35yo man who pursues a teenager, hmmmm,,)