Bethany Casse Leaves her small town behind and heads to Chicago to work for a top bank as an underwriter. She ends up meeting two completely different men, and embarks on two completely different relationships with them. With Kent Plack, she finds in him the best friend that she has been missing since leaving her best friend Kendy behind in the small town she is from. Kent and Bethany decide to just be friends as Kent doesn't do anything other than casual and never does repeats. Bethany is surprised at how quickly their friendship grows, and how much she depends on him. With Brian Burcham, Bethany finds the perfect boyfriend and forever guy. They have a lot in common, he is nice and motivated and they are a great match. At first Bethany is determined to keep him as a friend only since they work together. But Brian wears her down, and she eventually decides to give him a shot. When her past catches up with her though and Kent needs her help, Bethany agrees to marry him so that he can access his trust fund and in exchange he will take care of all her debt. Soon the lines between love and friendship become blurred, and Bethany is struggling with how to maintain relationships with both men when there are unexpected feelings. Can Bethany figure out which guy is the right one for her, and will she be able to move forward and have a future with one of them?
I had a hard time liking Kent at first. He was spoiled and entitled and impossibly arrogant. He didn't work at all and didn't even seem to care that people saw him as a useless manwhore. He was different with Bethany though, and I liked their growing friendship. It was good to see him take an interest in her and that he was able to really form a bond with her. He was not used to caring about anyone but his family, and it was nice to see him find someone that work him up to what he was capable of. Brian didn't really do anything for me honestly. He was just sort of there, and he never was a real contender in my opinion. He was perfectly nice, but perfectly boring. He might have been a good guy, but to me he never belonged with Beth. I also didn't like the fact that he agreed to the whole marriage pact when Beth was honest with him and then turned around and completely changed his mind shortly after. I understand that he didn't want to see her do that when he loved her, but he should have said so upfront and not flip flopped on her. Beth was another one that I had a few issues with. While I thought that she was smart and driven and I liked the fact that she respected herself enough to keep things platonic with Kent, I also felt like she tried to hard to force herself into living the perfect life. She might have liked Brian, but I felt like she was sort of leading him on and lying to herself the entire time. I kept waiting for her to see what was right under her nose and she just took forever to wake up and needed others to help her see it. I also felt like she should have been more honest with Kent and talked to him about what she was thinking and feeling.
My biggest problem with this story was that I felt like so much was left unresolved in this book and I feel like we didn't get closure on a lot of things. If there was another book coming, it might have been different but I don't believe there is and so a lot of things left up in the air really bothered me. We never were told what happened with Beth's job. She had accepted a new position in California and we never heard how she got out of that or if she did. We also never found out when exactly Kent's feeling changed and when he stopped sleeping around. Also what happened with the woman outside his place and who was she? I really wanted answers to all the questions that were brought up, and I just didn't understand why the author decided to leave so many things left unanswered. I also felt like this book was really hard to get into at first and was very slow at the beginning. It honestly took me awhile to get into, but I am glad that I stuck with it. I think another problem with this book is that it almost felt like two stories that were merged into one, and it left things a little disjointed for me. I felt like the first half of the book was one story while the second half was another. At first things were completely friendly between Kent and Beth and she didn't see him as anything more. Then in the second half after she realizes that Brian wasn't right for her because she had always been in love with Kent, I wasn't quite able to see where she was coming from. I mean I saw things changing but I just felt like she hadn't been in love with him the whole time unless I was really missing something. I just didn't really see any evidence in the first half of the book that led me to believe differently. I really wish that things between Kent and Beth would have started a little earlier in the story. I think that they were a little too late, and at that point with so many things left unanswered it was hard to really get behind their relationship at that point. I needed to see them acting as a couple falling in love rather than just friends that were growing closer and flirting at times. I think that this one had a lot of potential but just fell short. I still think that Mia Kayla has made a promising start with this debut novel, and I am interested to see what she writes from this point forward. I will definitely give her another shot in the future.
**Review Copy Provided by Tasty Book Tours**
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