"Ava Rani creates the perfect mix of romance and drama!" — People

To make her ex jealous, an ambitious young surgeon recruits a charming star soccer player to be her date to a lavish Parisian wedding—but love might have a game plan of its own, in this stand-alone romance from the USA Today bestselling author of the Biotech Billionaires series.

Dr. Isabelle Mercado is this close to having it all. Top of her class at the country’s most competitive orthopedic surgery residency, a dream career within reach, and a golden ticket to the wedding of the year in Paris.

There’s just one problem: her ex—the one who got away—is going to be there… with his perfect new fiancée.

Desperate to save face (and maybe spark a little jealousy), Isa enlists soccer legend and global heartthrob Austin Cade to be her fake date. It’s the perfect match: after an injury and some unfortunate encounters with the press, he needs good PR and the kind of elite connections this wedding will attract. Plus, her ex just so happens to be his #1 fan. Win-win.

But between champagne toasts, macaron baking classes, and stolen glances under the Parisian stars, pretending starts to feel a lot like the real thing. Isa’s always been all-in on her career—love was never the goal.

But maybe, just maybe… this time, the heart has its own agenda.

My Review:

What Dr. Isabelle Mercado and soccer player Austin Cade have in common at the beginning of this romance seems shallow enough to fill a thimble. Not that either of them ARE shallow, just that you would think – for that matter they both would and do think – that they’re not so much opposites as on entirely different planes of existence.

Not in any terrible or judgmental ways, either. It’s just that Isa is a senior medical resident in a high-stakes, high-pressure, even more male dominated branch of a still male dominated profession. Her focus on her career is so total that most of her friendships and all of her romantic relationships have been sacrificed to her achievement of that career since she was a child.

She’s about to reach the goal she’s been aiming for all of her life – and she can’t afford to let anything stand in her way. Like the blurry, off-kilter feeling she’s suffering from because the guy she’s spent several years believing she was in an on/off relationship that would eventually result in their happy ever after has not only moved on without telling her, he’s gotten engaged and has been invited to her best friend’s Paris wedding as a family friend’s plus-one.

Isa is utterly thrown for a loop. Which is where Austin Cade comes into the picture. Not that he hasn’t already been in the picture, but as a patient for her mentor. She’s not Austin’s doctor. Not that she hasn’t noticed him, but she’s NOT his doctor.

The story steps on the “Troperville Trolley” when she decides she needs a date to that wedding that will make her ex regret that he let her go. That will make him understand that she’s not only moved on, but that she did it with one of his biggest heroes.

It’s a fake dating scheme that benefits them both. She’s not sad, lonely and rejected in Paris, and she gets to make her ex regret his action. What Austin gets is what makes the story interesting. Because he’s 38, he’s recovering from his second major injury, and his playing days are numbered and he knows it.

He’s figuring out his second act. Which might be coaching. Being in Europe will give him a chance to talk with some teams about coaching opportunities. But it will also give him an opportunity to drum up support for his REAL goal – creating a combination training academy and coaching opportunity IN THE UNITED STATES, for kids just like he was who need a boost into the Premier League AND to create the same kind of infrastructure for the sport in the US that exist in Europe.

It’s a big, big idea. And it’s a seriously risky proposition. But when Austin and Isa team up in Paris, it starts to look like a real possibility. And so does the possibility of their relationship continuing once they return to the US.

At least until Isa’s ambitions get in the way of her happiness. Because life has taught her that women like her don’t get to “have it all” and that her heart will be a little less broken if she breaks it off while she’ll still survive the pain.

Escape Rating A+: Honestly, I picked this one up solely for one of the narrators. Vikas Adam is one of those narrators I’d be willing to listen to read a grocery list. All the grocery lists. Possibly alternated with Dion Graham and Natalie Naudus, but I wouldn’t have looked twice at this book if he hadn’t been one of the voices. (Not that the other narrator, Vanessa Vasquez, didn’t also do an excellent job, because she certainly did. I just didn’t KNOW that when I started.)

Howsomever, missing this book would have been a terrible mistake. Because this turned out to be awesome in ways I wasn’t expecting AT ALL. I was expecting a bit light and fluffy – and the blurb certainly led me to believe that this would be an express ride on the “Troperville Trolley”, but I didn’t expect the story to work for me nearly as well as it did.

Which it did. A LOT.

The story isn’t about those tropes. The tropes aren’t what’s holding it up or holding anything together. They’re just a way of setting the stage. And it’s the stage that kept me glued to either my audiobook or my book to see what happens next.

Because the story is about the myth of having it all, and the realization that women really can’t without giving something up. That’s the perspective that Isa comes into the story with because it’s the example she’s grown up with. And it’s real for women whether they are on the path to becoming orthopedic surgeons or just planning on a consuming and rewarding and above all, ambitious career in ANY field.

Isa’ parents are both surgeons. They met in medical school. Her MOTHER was the star student, but her FATHER is the one who made a big name for himself in orthopedic surgery. Because her mother put HER career on the back burner to have Isa, and her father NEVER had to face any of those compromises.

Her father has done nothing but push Isa to sacrifice everything to be the best, to follow in his footsteps and to be HIS legacy, while her mother has acted as if Isa needs to excel because she stepped off that same path. Or, at least, that’s Isa’s take on her mother.

It’s a scenario in which, no matter how hard she tries AND how much she succeeds, it’s never good enough. Because she’s always in her father’s shadow while being aware of her mother’s regrets. (If there’s a misunderstandammit in this story it’s between Isa and her mother because they’re each assuming things about the other and not ever having a conversation about the truth of the thing. Which works because we don’t have those kinds of conversations with our parents even when we should.)

Isa is all too aware that women in medicine, or in any STEM field, face judgment and consequences that men simply don’t. And she’s more than ambitious enough in her own right to question all of that, to recognize how unfair the system is, and still want to prove them all wrong and to prove she’s better.

Which is why both her best friend’s wedding and her ex’s engagement throw her for a loop. Not because she wants him back, but because the situation shines a focus on everything she’s given up to get where she is. And that she’s not sorry she made the sacrifices she’s made, and she’d do it all again, but she’s looking at her future and wondering if her life is always going to be this way because any relationship requires compromise and she can’t even think about without feeling threatened. Which a compromise might very well be.

What makes the story and the romance work is that Austin falls for her exactly as she is, ambitions, single-minded focus, and all. He doesn’t need her to be anything other than who she really is. Because his story is that his playing days are nearly over and his next act is going to be his own dream – but that’s flexible and he’s gotten all the ego validation he needed when he was a player (in multiple senses of that word).

He wants her to be happy with HER choices, and he wants them to be HER choices. He just wants those choices to include him. So the romance works, once Isa gets over freaking out about things, because Austin forces her to question herself about which of her choices are really hers and which ones are all about her father’s need for a legacy in terms that her father understands and accepts.

The story doesn’t take any of the easy ways out to get to the HEA. Isa’s dream has always been to be a surgeon. And she is ambitious and driven about it and she does have an uphill climb. But in her recognition that she doesn’t need to keep walking in her father’s footsteps, that being HIS legacy is not HER dream, and that she can invest in a future and a career and a life that is hers, may be hard to achieve but is within her reach without compromising what’s important to her with either a partner who expects her to make all the compromises or with a father who only sees her as a reflection of his own glory.

So what stuck with me, and why I enjoyed this so much even as I angsted right along with Isa, was that this was a story about adults making adult decisions about the directions of their lives together and separately. Not that the romance isn’t fan-damn-tastic and not that Isa and Austin don’t raise the temperature of any room they banter in, but because their starting places rested in important decisions their compromises – and their HEA – felt earned because they worked through their issues both separately AND together.