Rating: 5 stars
Buy Link:
Amazon | iBooks | Amazon UK
Length: Novel


Don has a favorite customer. He shouldn’t — every customer who walks into his coffee shop should be his favorite — but he does. Raine Amari, a well-known and slightly infamous divorce lawyer, is gorgeous, sardonic with a dry wit, and always impeccably dressed. The man is brilliant and confident and … a Cupid. A personification of romance, much as Don is a Frost. Raine is supposed to make people fall in love and find their true loves, not help them end their marriages. Raine comes into the coffee shop every day for the same drink: coffee, black, strong, with nothing added, nothing to soften the bitterness. And every day, he comments on the frost etched patterns Don has decorated his window with. It’s not quite a friendship … until it is.

This is a story light on the paranormal and heavy on the romance. For all that Don is a Frost and can create ice and etch designs onto windows, he’s still just a guy who owns a coffee shop. He’s friendly, personable, and he likes to make people happy. He likes to play with flavors and find something new that will make his customers smile, and when he can make Raine smile, Don’s whole day becomes that much better. For all that Raine is gorgeous, Don loves the man more than the suits and the hair and the golden eyes and — okay, so he loves those parts, too. But he also loves seeing him intent over spreadsheets, gleeful over writing emails, or driven when he’s helping a client. He loves the compassion, the competence, and the person that is Raine. The rest is just a pleasant extra.

Raine is a Cupid who can feel when two people are on the edge of falling in love. He can feel the arousal and lust and love of any partners. Sort of. Love isn’t always a forever thing. Sometimes it fades, sometimes two people, no matter how much they honestly love one another, just aren’t meant to be together. Raine has had his share of the good and the bad sides of love, but he keeps coming back to Don. When he sees Don looking at a young man, Raine is quick to brush the matter off because he knows what Don needs, and what Don deserves, and it isn’t some “perky good-morning-but-all-day-long sexual stamina” with bad fashion sense.

The two are so good as friends that, when Don finally realizes what Raine isn’t saying and takes him out on a date, and then home for the night, everything feels perfect. Almost too perfect, and for Raine, it’s like a nightmare come to life. Has he, inadvertently, used his powers on Don? Did his desire for Don become a siren song to draw Don to him? And — strangely — that’s when the romance and the flirting kick in to high gear as Raine tells Don he can’t see him anymore. It’s not that he doesn’t want him, but he has to know that it’s Don’s want, not Raine’s.

So they agree to text.

What follows is sweet, and romantic, and so mundane. Pictures of coffee cups, phone calls about random nothing. Months and months with their only communication being over the phone. They know their desires are compatible, but this prolonged courtship only serves to strengthen their relationship. And it’s perfect.

I love the “my brain has left the building,” the constant small ways in which they know each other, and the cheerleader co-workers who think the whole thing is adorable and do everything they can to support without getting in the way. This hits all the fluffy and adorable buttons for me, with a slow burn of acquaintances with crushes, to friends with crushes, to two men unable to form coherent sentences because the person they like is implying they may just like them back. It’s goofy, clumsy, cotton-candy fluff and I loved it.

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