Rating: 2 stars
Buy Link: Amazon | iBooks | Amazon UK
Length: Novel

After Kade’s father died, his mother went back to work, but there’s not enough money to make ends meet. Kade is 21, and while he’s graduated college, his career prospects are currently slim. When Kade applies for a job as a personal assistant, he has no experience, but knows he can do the job. Even if it means working for Luke Preston.

Luke is a successful lawyer with a less than successful personal life. While his abrupt and cold demeanor may work in the court room, it doesn’t work so well as it carries over to every other aspect of his life. Luke’s last relationship left him being taken advantage of and vulnerable and neither of those things are acceptable to Luke. He has no intention of letting anyone get close again, especially an employee that is fifteen years younger than him. If only he could tell his heart the same thing.

This book didn’t work for me almost from page one. When the book opens, Kade is looking for a job online and is unsuccessful in finding anything. He then goes to the diner to visit his best friend at work and there just happens to be a newspaper left behind with an ad for a personal assistant job. When he calls, Luke himself answers the phone and demands that Kade come to the office in the next few minutes. So now, Luke is said to be a successful lawyer in a successful firm. The opening interaction read as dated with the job opening being in the newspaper. There is a reason given as to why Luke answered the phone himself, which is based around an answering machine not being turned on, and again, it did not read as current. It’s difficult to get into a book when the setup doesn’t work for you.

When Kade goes to the office, everyone is unprofessional and inappropriate. Luke plays the part of the tortured, rich hero with secrets, but he doesn’t do it convincingly. His sister, who works for him, doesn’t have pleasant things to say about him, calls him an “ass,” and Luke’s character wasn’t mysterious or intriguing, he was just lashing out at anyone in his path.

Kade immediately is attracted to Luke, basically for his looks because it can’t be for his personality. He doesn’t realize Luke is interested in him until someone else tells him and he also has to be told that he is in love with Luke. In fact, several characters consistently tell the two of them that they are in love with each other as if they could never figure this out on their own. And when Kade admits that Luke has managed to “burrow” his way into his heart, it was not shown when this could have possibly happened because the characters never had a substantial conversation. Then, all of a sudden Luke is having these emotional moments with Kade and none it made sense for what was going on as the characters had only interacted publicly with a sense of disdain for each other.

Kade will do whatever it takes to get Luke, so they then become fuck buddies. It was like the book moved from scene to scene without anything in the middle to tie the scenes together. While it was always clear which character was speaking, much of the dialogue was tired and cliched. The book then takes on a soap opera style feel with the way the story line progressed. This book is the first in a series and there was a roster of side characters seemingly tossed in maybe to then have their stories told at a later date, but it was overloaded for this one book. My impression was that the book tried to follow the trope of the rich, successful man with a past filled with secrets, but it was all poorly executed for my tastes.