🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 4.7/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read Denim & Diamonds yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
“Maybe while you’re in there you can pry that stick out of your ass.”
That’s basically the energy of this entire book and I am so okay with it.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
So February ends up at this wellness retreat for the most ridiculous reason possible. She has a morality clause buried in her business contract, and it gets triggered when she has hate sex with her industry rival Tobias at some fashion event and they both forget their mics are on. The whole thing — swearing included — gets broadcast live. Naturally her board loses it and ships her off.
One night she sneaks out to the bar in town — which, turns out, Brock actually owns — and gets properly drunk. Brock isn’t about to let her wander off in that state, so he brings her up to his apartment and lets her sleep it off. That’s how this whole thing kicks off. He starts calling her Red, and it sticks. The getting-to-know-you stretch is genuinely the best part of the book — flirty, low stakes, fun. That very first night she tries to order a drink with blue cheese, olives, and orange bitters, shaken. Brock flatly tells her not a chance in hell and hands her straight vodka instead.
Later, she shows up uninvited at his family’s poker game just to see him. He’s stunned. turns out he’d driven out to a market at least half an hour away specifically to track down blue cheese, olives, and orange bitters for her. Stirred, not shaken, this time. He sneaks her out again, to the fair, where he tells her he could tell you a sad story about practically anyone there if you looked close enough. She asks what their sad story would be. His answer: “They’d say see that knockout with Brock Hawkins? She’s not really his girl, just a mysterious woman passing through town with an expiration date.” That one landed.
He opens up about the year he’s had — a relationship that fell apart, a business venture that tanked — and tells her he wants more time with her. Brock himself is one of five brothers and tries to do one good deed a day, keeping a running log of them, which tells you most of what you need to know about who he is. He’d already been quietly buying up parts of the town to protect local jobs before his last girlfriend left him — she ended things because he refused to leave Meadowbrook, not the other way around.
Then Tobias shows up at the bar. He announces, out loud, in public, that he’s there because he wants to have sex with someone he hates — “if only he could tape her mouth shut” is the actual sentence this man says about February. AND Brock starts putting it together and gets drunk over it. February finally has enough and pushes Brock into admitting his feelings for her, then tells him flat out she’s done being used by people. Brock is too far gone that night to deal with any of it, so she tells him she’ll wait to hear from him tomorrow.
Which sets up one of the funniest stretches in the book. Visiting hours at the retreat only run on Sundays, and it’s now Monday, so Brock lies his way in by claiming to be her brother who drove twelve hours and got the wrong time. They let him in. He kisses her. The woman who let him in walks in mid-kiss and shrieks, “Why are you kissing your brother?!?” Without missing a beat, Brock says, “Oh, I should tell you, ma’am — I’m actually her stepbrother.” I am never getting over that line.
Then comes the pregnancy scare, told from Brock’s perspective — starting with him spiraling about how none of this works if she’s pregnant, and ending with him realizing he wants to figure it out anyway because he genuinely likes her. That shift seems to be what pushes February toward inviting her own dad to family day, which matters given her history with him. She caught him cheating on her mom as a kid, he made her keep the secret, and she basically stopped speaking to him for years over the anxiety it caused her.
Later, February gets invited to her ex-husband’s wedding — to her former best friend, which is exactly as weird as it sounds. Brock offers to go with her and then it just never comes up again. He gets fitted for a tux. Then his brother tells him his surgery — the one Brock is supposed to take care of him for — landed on the exact weekend of the wedding. As a reader you assume he’s not going. February assumes the same, especially given how things had been left between them. She gets ready to go alone.
And then he shows up at her door anyway, having jumped through every hoop necessary and arranged help for his brother so he could be there for her.
On the business side, February’s own board is the one that invoked the morality clause that sent her to the retreat in the first place, and once she’s back they call a second meeting just two weeks later — completely outside the norm. A package arrives. It’s a buyout offer. From Tobias. One of her own board members tried to use her biggest rival to take over part of her company. She responds by invoking the buyout clause in her own contract and walking away from all of them.
And then the surprise baby plot drops. Brock’s ex, who he’s been ignoring, shows up pregnant and due in under a month, having only tried reaching him for the past month. His ex insists there’s no possibility it’s anyone else’s, then hands him adoption papers and sole custody paperwork. She does not want this baby and she’s not pretending otherwise. She schedules a paternity test. It comes back positive.
I have an instinctive dislike for the surprise baby trope as a rule, but the part that actually got me was the part I didn’t see coming — she doesn’t fight for custody or drag this out. She fully and permanently gives up her parental rights and walks away.
After the baby arrives, nobody quite knows how to handle anything. February visits and falls completely in love with the baby. Brock tells her he loves her. She doesn’t say it back, not because she doesn’t feel it but because the baby has complicated everything for her, and they break up.
She comes back for the baby’s christening. Brock and the baby end up in an accident, and that’s the moment that finally pushes February and Brock back together for good. She realizes exactly how much she’d been missing. They get back together, she ends up marrying Brock and becoming the baby’s mom, and she splits her time between New York and Meadowbrooke from there on out.
Best Part of This Book
The early flirty stretch where they’re just getting to know each other. It’s fun, it’s easy, it’s genuinely charming, and it’s the foundation that makes everything after it land.
Worst Part of This Book
The surprise baby storyline. I have an instinctive dislike of this trope in general — it tends to feel like a cheap way to manufacture conflict. This book didn’t fully escape that for me even though it executed the aftermath better than most.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥🔥🔥🔥 — Spicy and well earned. The romance is central to the plot throughout, not just an afterthought to the family drama.
The Ending — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Satisfied. The accident forces the clarity both of them needed, and watching February choose to fully step into the role of wife and mother — splitting her life between New York and Meadowbrooke rather than giving either up — felt like a genuinely earned resolution.
Would I Reread It?
Yes — I already have.
The Twist We Didn’t See Coming
Brock’s ex permanently giving up her parental rights. I expected a custody battle. I expected drama dragged out over chapters. Instead she just let go completely, and that landed harder than a fight would have.
The Hot Take
“Maybe while you’re in there you can pry that stick out of your ass,” “Why are you kissing your brother?!?” and “I knew I would either write about Spider-Man or my mom” are doing more comedic heavy lifting in this book than most full chapters of dialogue in other romances I’ve read this year.
Who Is This For
If you want a small town romance with genuine humor, a hero who shows up in every sense of the word, and you can tolerate a surprise baby storyline if it’s handled with some nuance — this one delivers.
Where to Get This Book
📖 Physical Book
🎧 Audiobook
📱 Ebook
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Plot Twisted. 🔥
🎧 | Genre: Romance | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥 | Narrators: Andi Arndt, Teddy Hamilton