Kate has caught her fiance screwing a stripper not long before she she was supposed to marry him. She breaks off the engagement and flees to Dubai where she joins her friend Niamh. She gets a job at a school and is determined to forget her loser fiance.
On her first day at work she meets Kai, a very hot stranger. Not long after she ends up in his bed and they start a passionate relationship.
This book showed so much potential. I really enjoyed the beginning of the book. Kate is nice and snarky, Niamh is her hilarious friend and I laughed out loud quite a few times. I really liked Kate’s first encounter with Kai. The first sex scene between Kai and Kate is incredibly hot and left me wanting more.
But then the book seems to sort of stall. Kate does not develop at all as a person and what was funny in the beginning of the book becomes grating. She has extremely low self-esteem, we constantly hear how she thinks she is ugly despite Kai telling her over and over again that she is beautiful. Every woman she meets who even slightly bats her eyes at Kai is a slut or at least a threat.
Towards the end of the book it seemed like Donna used her inspiration of Fifty Shades of Grey. Kai suddenly feels it okay – in the middle of a passionate sex scene – to spank Kate. Now I am not averse to a bit of BDSM in my books. What I do object to is one of the partners unilaterally deciding to go the BDSM route without discussing this beforehand. You can’t just do that in the middle of sex, you need to discuss it – with setting clear boundaries – when you are both level-headed, not when you’re in the middle of sex. And Kate clearly didn’t enjoy it. So that was an immediate turn off for me. Add to that the reveal at the end of the book that Kai had investigated Kate and the book was completely ruined for me. I like myself an Alpha male as much as the next girl, but I draw the line at borderline abusive stalkers.
I sadly won’t be reading the other books in this series.