After a year in which she committed to say ‘yes’ to every opportunity that came her way, Lottie is fed up and just wants a quiet life. So this year, she’s giving herself permission to stop worrying about what other people want. If she doesn’t want to do something, she’s just going to say No. Starting with the drunk jerk who just propositioned her outside the pub…
Working as a virtual PA, Lottie’s biggest client is Seb, who runs a veterans’ support charity. Since they started working together, Seb’s become one of her closest friends, but Lottie works very hard not to let Seb know she has a giant-sized crush on him. Only, after finally meeting him in person, it’s getting more and more difficult!
I’m just going to note here that it’s really nice to read a romance with a disabled protagonist. Seb’s an army veteran who lost most of his leg to an IED in Afghanistan and wears a prosthesis, and he has a few hangups and issues around it, but it never affects how Lottie sees him at all. There’s a nice subplot regarding Seb’s family and some messy relationships where they haven’t really dealt with the emotional fallout of his injury which felt very realistic.
There’s a few misunderstandings which are clearly in service of the plot, but I actually bought into them pretty well because most of them were based in a tenet Lottie was trying hard to stick by; don’t mix work and pleasure. She didn’t want to risk losing her biggest client and one of her best friends by trying to add romance into the mix, and she actually behaved very professionally in turning Seb down when he asked. Of course, it wasn’t going to work because she was already head over heels for him even if she couldn’t acknowledge it to herself, but she was trying.
This is actually the first ‘rom-com’ I’ve read in a while which deserves the label. No, it wasn’t laugh-a-minute funny, but it was charming, amusing and very definitely a romance from early on as we met Seb in the first few pages. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I’d definitely read more books by this author. Five stars!
Disclaimer: I received a review copy of this title via NetGalley and Rachel's Random Resources.