This is what I would call a typical 'sweet and fluffy' Harlequin romance. I struggled to get into it a little bit. At times, the descriptions were amazing; beautifully detailed, lavish descriptions of scenery; and at others things were just skimmed over. The example I'm going to give is when Grayson and Annabelle had to 'mix chemicals' to try and regenerate some faded ink for an old document. Some more detail here would have been really interesting; maybe a little scene where they both joked about being bad at chemistry at school (cue personal chemistry).
Perhaps the oddest omission was the book's one and only love scene. At least, I THINK it was a love scene. We seemed to skip straight from Grayson deciding to give in to Annabelle's attempt to seduce him, to the following morning and them both being angry with each other.
It's perfectly OK to write explicit, or gently skimmed-over, or even fade to black love scenes. Leaving your reader uncertain whether it actually happened, and if so, what happened in the aftermath (was it bad? did she ask him to leave? did he storm out in a rage?) is just strange. I had to flip back and forth a couple of times in the e-book to be sure I hadn't skipped a page accidentally.
The plot was intriguing, the characters well-drawn, but I have to admit that I ended the book with a slight sense of frustration because it seemed like there were things missing. I don't know if the author needed to get in under a certain word count and made the decision to cut certain scenes, but I felt like this book would have been greatly improved by fleshing-out a lot of things that were just skimmed over.
Enjoyable, but should probably have been about 20k words longer.
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book for review through NetGalley.