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Our days are full of secrets. Our nights are for seduction…

For the last year, I’ve wanted someone I can’t have. The man my father built his latest multimillion dollar business with. He’s a decade older than I am, and he’s entirely forbidden.

The fact that he’s never given me a second glance only makes me long for him more. But the other night, across the room at a gala, everything changed.

His broody gaze lingered on me and grew darker.

So I’m officially done being the good girl. Tomorrow I turn 21. As a gift to myself, I plan to seduce my father’s business partner.

Happy birthday to me.

I struggled mightily with this one, despite it being a mouthwatering age-gap kind of story that I (not-so) secretly dig. The cover says it’s written by Lauren Blakely, but the New Adult voices bordering on cringey somehow don’t really line up with what I know of Blakely’s more ‘adult-ish’ tone for her books.

There was definitely a poor-little-rich-girl vibe that had a determined Harlow going after her womanising father’s business partner and if that didn’t really smack of desperation all around, there was too much of a staged process where Harlow schemed, flirted and plotted her way to get closer to Bridger.

On the other hand, Bridger’s struggle with his attraction to a younger woman made him blow hot and cool, yet it never really felt like a relationship of equals despite Blakely’s relatively low-angst version of both protagonists being relatively mature about what they both want and how they feel. And although this has nothing to do with our couple in question, having Harlow’s unsavoury, immoral father in the mix detracted from the sheen of their relationship, considering he is the very factor that is also a source of conflict between them.

I ending putting down and taking up ‘The RSVP’ numerous times, the slow-burning somehow turning into a glacial burn when I thought it could move faster. Overall, it’s not a bad read as Blakley quite deftly manoeuvres past all points of conflict–and gets them over quickly rather than drawing them out–but maybe it’s not quite my thing.