Fool Me Once by Katee Robert Series: Foolproof Love #2
Published by Entangled Publishing on August 1st 2016
Pages: 154
Buy on Amazon
Goodreads
They say opposites attract, but this is just ridiculous.
Aubry Kaiser doesn’t like people—actually, that’s not right. She loathes people. With her crippling anxiety, there’s no way she can demo her favorite video game at a convention with five thousand other people. Maybe if she brings someone to act as a shield…
But the only person available is the sexy cowboy she can’t stand.
Quinn Baldwyn is in a mess of his own. He’s been dodging his wealthy family’s matchmaking attempts—and life advice—for years, but with his sister’s wedding on the horizon, he needs of a shield of his own.
He and Aubry can barely hold down a civil conversation, but in bed…fireworks. And the closer they get to Quinn’s sister’s wedding, the more he realizes that he might actually like Aubry.
Now it’s up to him to convince her she might actually like him, too.
Quinn’s and Aubry’s story is a classic enemies-to-lovers one but I was still surprised to learn that their mutual dislike for each other wasn’t a front for attraction or love in the guise of hate. And it’d taken very special circumstances for these two to get together to resolve their own deeply entrenched personal biases and issues.
As polar opposites, there’s very little to go on between them apart from lust and it’s refreshing that both the lead characters readily admit this much, to the extent where they convince themselves that what’s between them is merely surface deep. But therein lies the conflict as well and perhaps the cliché as well will be the ultimate deciding factor of their compatibility and the conscious decision to find common ground together towards the end.
But if Katee Robert explored a fair bit of Aubry’s rather insane social phobias and her anxieties, I felt as though I’d been left hanging with Quinn’s own unresolved burdens: we’re told about his beef with personal relationships but not given the exact circumstances why, to start with. I also felt that his personal struggles with his sister and his best friend’s death could have been expanded on, the details of which could have shaped him out to be a more multifaceted and sympathetic leading character to match an already complicated female lead.
The devil in the details aside, ‘Fool me Once’ is a very easy read and it’s mostly an enjoyable ride (throw in all the cowboy sex jokes here, because there’s nothing there that the story doesn’t already use) without too much angst or unnecessary drama for a story this short. Quinn and Aubry acted the way I fully expected them to, and as extreme as the latter can get at times, I mostly thought this unusual couple was memorable because of how different they were without pretending to be anything else other than what they could be.
