The Boss's Fake Fiancee

The Boss's Fake Fiancee

by Inara Scott

Rating: 2 of 5 stars

My Review:
This book started with some happy tingles and I was very optimistic about the rest of the book. This is one of the tropes I tend to really like. Lowly minion is attracted to her billionaire boss and implies a relationship with him to her ex to make him jealous and/or prove she's moved on.

In this case, the ex sells the story to the tabloids. I kept thinking the reasoning behind this was going to be more elaborate. You know, maybe he was doing it because she used to work for him and she was too good of an employee to lose. Or maybe he wanted someone to dig up her secret project to discredit her abilities and keep her from patenting her newest breakthrough. Something, anything. But the only thing we get was “he's jealous”.

The hero, Garth, starts out as just one of those elusive billionaires and I had high hopes for him too. But most of the time, he just behaved like a jerk. We're supposed to believe that Melissa falls in love with him, just because sometimes he's not a asshat to her. Oh, and he's nice to his grandmother and some animals.

I just wasn't feeling it. Melissa's all vulnerable and emotional about everything. Garth is closed off and shares nothing of himself. But somehow Melissa falls in love with him. I saw very few interactions that would tell me they actually like each other for anything other than sex. We're told they talk and that they have a nice time together, but the few times we see them outside the bedroom, Garth has snide looks and comments and generally behaves like he's the only person in the world that matters.

He's capable of having conversations with business associates and “playing the game” socially when he's looking for funding, but when it's something that matters to Melissa, he's not even capable of having one or two polite conversations. He puts his angry, jerk mask on “whenever he feels vulnerable”, but in the end, he's still just acting like a jerk.

There were also many times that people or organizations are referenced in passing that seem rather important to the story, but aren't really fleshed out. There's this whole story line of autism advocacy and the company's newest development, but we don't see anything about that. It's just thrown in at the end of the book that obviously Melissa cares about this because she's a part of this autism advocacy group.

We're told that Garth is on the autistic spectrum, but what is the line between “you're just not nice” and “you don't know how to interact”? I'm not sure. Maybe if the book were longer and we got more chunks of seeing the interaction, instead of just being told about it, I would have liked Garth and the story more. As it stood, by the end of the book, there was so little that I liked about the characters that their resolution didn't even matter to me. I didn't really care if they were together or not because they didn't seem to have any noticeable substance that would make me like them.