...Bookfanatic

Darcy Bridges works as a boyfriend for hire and no in this case it’s not code talk for sex-trade worker. His life plan had been the military but as is often the case life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans so when an injury ends that plan he goes to work with his childhood friend, Rowan at Bryant & Waites, Boyfriends for hire.

When Adrian’s sister, Abby needs a date to attend a family wedding with her. She turns to Rowan & Waites for assistance. While Darcy and Abby become fast friends…thankfully there’s Abby’s only interest in Darcy is platonic and business…as in he’s her pretend boyfriend and maybe Abby’s a total workaholic and just doesn’t have time for relationships. Adrian thinks his sister’s idea of hiring someone to pose as her boyfriend is bad but even worse is the fact that Darcy pushes all of Adrian’s boyfriend buttons.

‘Darcy’ turned out to be a sweet, pretend boyfriend story with the twist that Darcy was pretending to be Abby’s boyfriend and not her brother, Adrian’s, no spoiler here it’s in the blurb. I liked that there was no emotional conflict between Abby and Adrian where Darcy was concerned.  for Abby, her relationship with Darcy was a business transaction, however, Darcy and Abby did become friends and all things considered that was nice.

There was some side drama that added to this one in regards to Abby and their cousin Charlotte and while it had the potential to be way more over the top than it was and even seemed a bit pointless in the beginning by the end of the story the how’s and why’s of this belonging to the whole pretend boyfriend situation made sense and I ended up liking this part of things because it did have a place in the overall story and wasn’t just an extra bit of drama.

The wedding in question is a ‘society event’ and takes place over the course of a week at a posh hotel bringing Darcy and Adrian into close contact on a daily basis and testing Darcy’s resolve to not pursue Adrian until ‘after the contract term is up’ on more than one occasion. Overall, I liked Darcy and Adrian were a good match and I liked them together and enjoyed seeing them get to know each other as both men also tired to ignore their attraction to each other on a more physical level.

This was a sweet, fun, low angst, slightly different pretend boyfriend story that I found to be fairly enjoyable with the biggest exception being the fact that I just didn’t understand Adrian’s whole feelings of being disloyal to his sister because of his interest in Darcy given that he knew Darcy was gay and his sister wasn’t interested in Darcy in ‘that way’. I got that he didn’t feel like he could pursue a relationship with Darcy while he was pretending to be Abby’s boyfriend but to me that felt more like it should be a ‘wait’ situation not a big ‘guilt’ situation…but maybe that’s just me…whatever, it was a niggle and definitely didn’t spoil my enjoyment of the story because in the end it all came together and I had a really pleasant reading experience that made me smile.

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A copy of ‘Darcy’ was graciously provided by the authors in exchange for an honest review.