Three years earlier, the heroine jilted the hero the day before their wedding because she feared he was as controlling as her father. (Insert backstory about heroine's oppressed mother.) The hero, who has been impotent since their break-up, has decided on a three-pronged revenge to recover his machismo:
1) He hires the architect heroine to design the dream home they had discussed during their courtship, to remind her of all she could have had if she had married him
2) He will seduce her, to sex her out of his system.
3) In the process, he will squire her about publicly, so when it's over "everyone" will know that he dumped her.
I like many things about this book, but two things stand out (oh, heavens, this is going to be an enumerating review):
1) The hero's gregarious personality. He's an extrovert who enjoys partying, the company of others, and takes joy out of life. It isn't partying for sex or partying to prove he's part of an elite social strata. He parties for fun. Smart does a great job conveying his outgoing charisma, even though most of the book presents the protagonists in an isolated bubble.
2) Smart keeps the heroine out of the victim role by having her stand behind the choice she made 3 years ago. There's no pathetic mooning after the hero. She wants to sex him out of her system, too. (She sees his decision not to make love before their wedding three years ago as more evidence of his controlling nature. She wanted sex then. She'll take it now.)
However, I am incredibly frustrated with their behavior at the time of the break-up. (Eek. More enumerating.)
1) The heroine never had a reasonable conversation with her fiancé about her concerns. Smart tries to convince the reader and the hero that his benign actions (saving sex for the wedding night, facilitating the heroine's transfer to an architecture program in Greece to complete her studies, an unfortunate comment to her father that they would start their family as soon as she was through with her education) form a scary, controlling pattern, but...they don't. She's too damaged to trust him and escalates their first discussion of the topic to a break-up in under ten minutes.
2) Part of the hero's extreme bitterness -- the underlying justification for his revenge plot -- is that he was publicly humiliated by showing up for the wedding and being abandoned at the altar. She broke up with him the night before. She didn't contact him that night to say she'd changed her mind. He didn't contact her before heading to the cathedral. Dude, the public humiliation? That's on you for being so arrogant you didn't believe her.
Obviously his inability to understand that the sudden, extreme argument represented a real fear for the heroine contributed to his foolishness in showing up for the wedding. And I'm not going to ding the heroine for being both sheltered (hence behaving younger than her years) and damaged. But there's still something aggravating about the lack of communication on both sides.