The Mortimers: Wealthy and Wicked, Book #5

Heat Factor: There’s some finger-banging in Chapter 1.
Character Chemistry: More benefits than enmity.
Plot: Something about their family companies signed a contract and Wren is trying to get out of it via half-hearted malicious non-compliance. Jasper wants to bone Wren and also work with her but also not renegotiate the contract so her company doesn’t get screwed. Maybe?
Overall: DNF
I gave up on this one because I just couldn’t make sense of what was going on, as might be evidenced by my plot summary. There’s a bit of a feuding families situation—Jasper’s dad ripped off Wren’s dad, but maybe also the corporate fighting has lasted generations. Then Wren’s brother and Jasper signed a contract for their companies to work together, but then Wren’s brother got sent to rehab and Wren is running the company and wants to get out of the contract because her company won’t see any profit for the first year and also she doesn’t want to spend time with Jasper because he’s too yummy. So to get out of the contract she’s just going to not do her job, in the hopes that Jasper will break it off? Or something? But she doesn’t actually not do her job because she’s a perfectionist. Maybe? Oh, and the job is building a casino in Morocco, which was revealed after several scenes of talking around “the job” and “the contract.”
I think that the core issue is really that Jasper and Wren both have inferiority complexes because of how their parents treated them as kids and therefore can’t lose…but the stakes of what “losing” actually means were never really clear.
Also, I did not buy that they were enemies. Perhaps because the family feud was too convoluted for me to figure out why they were supposed to be feuding. They are just people who are working on a job together who really want to bone. Wren kind of fights it.
Honestly, I don’t have a lot to say about this one. I didn’t hate it or anything. More like: enemies with benefits is a hard dynamic to nail, and this one didn’t succeed.
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