I liked this one a lot and I have Inna to thank for reminding me to read it as I had shelved it years ago and never got to it until today! 🤦
What I loved:
I loved these 2 goofy MCs individually and together they were an AMAZING couple who just clicked from the first moment they laid eyes on one another! The way they met was so funny. More on that later....
I loved that finally we got a Hero who is not a Manho or Millionaire/Billionaire and his awesome thoughts about sleeping around & lust in general (until heroine walked into his life, he said sex was not that important to him, though he did have an on again/off again ex OW who broke up him at the start of the story but he never loved her and didn't obsess about her. In fact, he forgot all about her as soon as heroine walked into his life).
I loved that there was no angst and how completely in love his family fell for her (especially his Mom) 😁
I loved how well they each supported one another and how well they meshed for two different personalities.
There is a lot to love so let me start with the plot:
Hero works for his family's accounting firm. He has some issues with his Dad who wants to control how he runs the company and is a workaholic. He is also a triplet. He has a brother & sister and 2 hippy parents who are goofy (his Mom mostly).
Heroine in turn has not had it easy of the home front. Her "sister" is actually her Bio Mom and her Grandparents raised her to believe they were her parents. All three of them while not physically abusive, were mentally abusing her and she was always alone growing up.
When MCs meet, they were both on the same flight from Denver to Boston. Hero having had a bad day & gotten his shoulder hurt, had a couple of drinks and on the flight decided to review resumes for an assistant. Heroine in turn was sitting on the back of the plane and exchanged her seat to sit next to Hero and found him turning down her resume with a rude "Hard Pass."
Well, she sees & hears this and decides turning the No to a Yes and that's what she does. So from the moment they meet, Hero especially is besotted by her and can't seem to say no to her. They go with him hiring her as his assistant (even though she had no experience in accounting) to his nursemaid, living together/roommates, his sleeping pillow buddy to eventually a couple and HEA.
I should mention though that the 2nd half was a bit boring for me. Once they hit the sheets, it seemed as if they lost that spark and humor that I enjoyed in the first half....🤷♀️
Safety:
No Cheating
No OW. OM in the form of her ex comes into the picture towards the end to get her to come back but she is not having it. She feels nothing for the OM.
No virgins
No intimate scenes with OP
Annoying part? His constant calling her "love". What the heck? He wasn't British for Pete's sake!
"Hard pass, huh?"
This was going to be fast and violent.
"Tell me, friend," I started, gesturing toward his screen, "what's the problem here?"
"No, really," I continued. "What's the problem? Why is it a—what did you call it? A hard pass?" I forced a snicker.
"It sounds like you're dealing with a kidney stone, not scanning a résumé."
He bobbed his head, his gaze locked on the stripe of blue hair tucked behind my ear. The stripe I'd been told was childish. "Okay."
"No, no, friend. I asked you a question." I tipped my head toward his screen, the one with Zelda Besh screaming across the top line. "What's the disqualifier here?"
"I'm sorry but," he started, his infuriatingly beautiful hazel eyes crinkling as he spoke, "what are we talking about?"
I leaned back, crossed my legs, folded my arms over my chest. Stared at him for a beat. "That's my résumé."
"That's not possible." He laughed, but it sounded like a sticky grocery cart wheel. He glowered between me and his screen. "That's…that's just not possible."
"I'm not sure why you're saying that," I replied. "I know what my résumé looks like. I know I sent gobs and gobs of them last night and this morning. When you think about the odds, it's not so impossible."
"What's the real reason I'm a hard pass? Because it doesn't matter whether I find a pen and show my work all over the back of an arm-long CVS receipt right now. It doesn't matter whether I can remember where my stats come from. It only matters that you passed before I logic'd through the odds of us sitting next to each other on this flight."
"While that was—uh—bizarre, I'm looking for a specific skill set."
Zelda's brows creased as a flash of understanding crossed her eyes. "Yeah, about that. Which job did I apply for?"
"Auditing assistant."
"All right, well, you tell me what the job involves and I'll tell you why I'm perfect."
----
"You're wackier than a bag of hammers."
"That doesn't sound like something you'd say."
His brows furrowed a bit. "And why not?"
"Zelda," he prompted. "Was your brain deprived of oxygen too long?"
"Nope. I'm all right here. All good," I replied. "It just doesn't sound like you. The wacky hammers. You're not a metaphor guy. You're finite, specific, tangible."
He shrugged. "My mom says it a lot. I think I picked it up from her."
----
"Why don't you want me to meet your family? That is, the portion that didn't invite themselves into your bedroom the other day."
He tapped a finger against my belly. "For one, they'd want to keep you."
"What's so bad about that? Your mother and sister are amusing as hell, especially when they literally stared at us in bed and carried on a conversation where they took turns insisting I'm Not Millie. Given this, I'm sure everyone else is equally amusing. And I'm not against being kept. As you might've noticed, I'm not that difficult to collect."
---
"Is that what I think it is?"
"If you're thinking it's my mother's secret herb garden, it is."
That nice lady with the reupholstered dining room chair cushions was growing a field of marijuana. Who would've guessed? "Are you serious?"
"I told you, my parents are hippies at heart."
"And that's why your mother has a bumper crop of weed hiding behind her blackberry bushes?" I asked.
----
"Are you going to change your mind later?" she asked.
"What are you asking, love?"
"I want to know if you're going to want me when it's convenient and push me away when you remember you're the boss and I'm—"
"No, I'm not doing that again. I hate that I've done it more than once, hate that I've done it at all. I've tried pushing you away and in case it wasn't clear, I missed you too much every time I did it. It was a shoddy attempt at trying to keep all the out-of-control pieces of my life in order."
"If you shared some of those pieces maybe they wouldn't feel out of control anymore," she said.
"As you've noticed, I'm not great at that," I admitted. Zelda laughed, sudden and bright, and I walked her backward until she was wedged between me and the first available tree. "And maybe you've also noticed I'm obsessed with you, you adorable evil genius."
"You don't have to say that because we kissed. What I do I need is for you to stop throwing me away when your thoughts get the better of you."
"I said it because I meant it," I replied. "And just so you know, you're never inconvenient. The rest of the damn world is inconvenient and you…you are not that."
She tipped her chin up as her lips curled into a playful grin. "That's a funny way of saying you don't know what to think of me."