Learning to Build or Choreograph a Loving Relationship
Sometimes it is easy to forget that loving another person and accepting love from that person is not an innate quality. Perhaps having the desire to love and to be loved is natural, but loving and accepting love needs to be modeled for an individual to develop a true understanding of the exchange of feelings. For the Mitchell brothers, a healthy giving and receiving of love has been hampered by growing up being used as chess pieces by their parents as their mother and father moved in and out of love, and used their sons as the emotional hostages to impose their will on the ex via the young boys. The only healthy, happy love relationship the brothers, Jonas and Turner, ever experienced that was not manipulative was the love of their paternal grandparents. And even their relationship with their grandad was complicated when after his retirement, their inventor grandfather became a billionaire from his creation of lifesaving heart valves, revolutionizing heart surgery. And as a result, the grandsons and heirs of the clever grandfather had to learn to discern true friends from greedy sycophants while still teenagers.
Now, as adults in their 30s, the Mitchell brothers are still single after evading the romantic campaigns since their teens of hundreds of women. Younger brother Turner, desperately wants to believe in love and has recently declared his desire to wed the beautiful Simone Gatsby, a rising star in the Blanc Ballet. But, Simone is fearful of letting her relationship with the younger Mitchell brother become public. She has been told that to become one of the principal female dancers, she must remain unattached—the appearance of romantic involvement outside of her performance on the ballet stage will undercut the stage magic of her performance. And already challenged by the racial bias existing in the dance world, she is afraid to let her love and marriage to Turner Mitchell become public. They need a cover—a diversion.
So, Turner reaches out to older brother Jonas, and Simone turns to co-worker and friend, Nadine Evans, the ballet’s Associate Development Director and Events Coordinator to help the young lovers deceive the paparazzi and the powers at Ballet Blanc. Handsome older brother Jonas with his dark hair and blazing blue eyes and the curvy hazel-eyed and wavy-haired Nadine agree to serve as decoys. But, Jonas and Nadine are more than casual acquaintances. They share a tense history that goes back to high school days when sophomore Nadine crushed on senior Jonas who had invited her to be his date to the prom. When he stood her up, he broke her young heart and humiliated her, crushing her crush and gaining an enemy. But, Nadine is now under pressure from the director of the ballet, Desmond Jones—a bully who uses his position to intimidate. He wants Nadine to use her decades long “friendship” with the billionaire venture capitalist Jonas to secure a donation to the ballet and is using coercion to enforce his will—if she can secure the donation, she will be promoted to the Director of Development, and if she doesn’t…well there are other dance companies in New York.
Roxy Reid’s latest romance keeps her readers busy focusing on the Mitchell brothers and their love lives. But, the real focus is on the snarky older brother, Jonas, and his unwillingness or inability to believe in the reality of love and the decades old pull between himself and Nadine. Reid offers the reader a look inside the challenges of wealth and how money often prevents the sparks of love from igniting before they are put out by greed.
I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review ARCS, but I enjoyed the reading experience so much that I bought a copy for my "read-again" titles.