Tara Johnson’s sacrifices are about to pay off: a senior executive at thirty-five at a Fortune 500 company, she’s one of the two finalists in line for a Managing Director position. Unfortunately, her rival of fifteen years, the charming, infuriating Richard Boyd, is just as qualified, and unlike her, he’s willing to cross pretty much every line to get what he wants.Of all the things Tara stored … stored in the attic to make it to the top, it’s her personal life she misses the most. That is, until she starts a steamy affair with sex god Aidan, her direct report. Interoffice relationships with a subordinate can mean the end of a career, and when Richard finds out, it’s the perfect opportunity to take his high-heeled nemesis out, especially since he’s still nursing a grudge against Tara for rejecting him years ago.
But Tara’s increasingly domineering lover has his own dark secrets, endangering more than just her career. As her liaison spirals out of control, salvation will come from the man she always thought she hated, and perhaps the only one to truly understand her.
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Tara is a high flying businesswoman who has been on her chosen career path for fifteen years and is now in with a chance of securing her ultimate job as Managing Director. The only person standing in her way is the particularly unpleasant Richard, her nemesis over those fifteen years.
At the beginning of the story, Richard arranges a ‘welcome to the company’ party for the new member of staff for which he has booked a stripper, then, sensing Tara’s disquiet over this, makes suggestive comments to her about threesomes. I was less than convinced by his behaviour, generally, as these days there is a far greater awareness of sexism in the workplace than there used to be, with employees aware of the perils of sexual harassment.
I did struggle a bit with this novel; apart from the occasional odd turn of phrase, the writing itself is fine and it was an easy read, but it contained too many inconsistencies. Tara is a senior executive in a prestigious company yet makes some appalling decisions and comes across as a bit flaky; she is hard to like. She has supposedly sacrificed everything by way of relationships and family for this role and yet speaks at the frequent women’s forums on work/life balance—something she knows nothing about.
Her ill-considered decisions include sleeping with a bad boy subordinate. She is shocked by his tattoos (really? Doesn’t 50% of the population under 35 have them these days?), yet doesn’t appear to consider the repercussions of sleeping with an employee.
*Spoiler alert*
Eventually the bad boy does indeed go bad, Richard intervenes and Tara, after fifteen years of competing against this bloke, drops gratefully into his arms; it turns out she’s just misunderstood him in the past. This didn’t work for me at all. There seemed to be no reasoning behind it.
Although this novel is not badly written, in my opinion the plot needs some revision. I found little understanding of general behaviour in the workplace these days, and thought the story would have worked better if the plot was suited to the characters, or vice versa; they seemed to be ‘shoehorned’ into unlikely developments.
Could be an easy ‘beach read’, but I am puzzled as to why it is listed as a romantic comedy. I didn’t spot any humour in it.
I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.
It’s been a long time since I’ve given a book only one star. As ridiculous as it sounds, rating books is something I take pretty seriously and I don’t like the idea of being all lackadaisical about it because occasionally, reviews do get read and they do influence other book lovers. Basically, I don’t just toss around one-star ratings for the fun of it.
First off, I didn’t like the characters. Any of them. I didn’t like Richard, I won’t even get into Aidan and I kind of hated Tara with the fire of a thousand suns. I couldn’t find even one redeeming quality about her that I could connect with. She’s super wishy-washy and if that’s how she was intended, that’s one thing. It’s another thing entirely when the author didn’t intend for her to be full of hot air … which I think is actually the case. This chick is all of woman’s equality. Which is all good! But you can’t be for women’s equality and then knowingly get sexually harassed for over a decade by a coworker. It just doesn’t make sense. Why have your character be contradictory like that? I mean if you want for women to be equal in the workplace, why would you sit by and just put up with this dude telling you to go have a threesome with him? There are tons and tons and tons of things that Richard said that Tara just brushed off and it just doesn’t fit.
Speaking of Richard … the reason that Tara and Richard don’t get along is the most flimsy and non-existent reason I’ve ever heard of. And that’s because you’re not really given a reason. You’re told these little snippets of situations that if Tara would just take half a second to get over herself, wouldn’t even matter. Aside from the sexual harassment, it’s like playground stuff … equivalent to hair pulling and pinching in elementary school. It just showed the immaturity in both of these “executives”.
Then there was this one part about how tattoos are taboo and basically it is said that if you want to have an important job and not have to ask people if they want fries with that, you can’t have tattoos. There was this long winded story about a CEO (or some other acronym) that flew to another country in shame just to get his tattoos removed. Really? That is not the case out here in the real world and that story was absolutely ridiculous and not accurate to how things actually work.
I really didn’t have time to really dive into this book. The reason is because I was wading through all of the ridiculously long inner monologues from Tara that the book just dragged. It would have taken me another 500 pages just to get interested with the way this story was going. It was rough for me. More than rough. Not a fan.
* I received this novel in exchange for an honest review *