Dominic was staring at me like he couldn’t decide whether to chop me into pieces or pull my hair and French kiss me.
Dominic
I got her fired. Okay, so I’d had a bad day and took it out on a bystander in a pizza shop. But there’s nothing innocent about Ally Morales. She proves that her first day of her new job… in my office… after being hired by my mother.
So maybe her colorful, annoying, inexplicably alluring personality brightens up the magazine’s offices that have felt like a prison for the past year. Maybe I like that she argues with me in front of the editorial staff. And maybe my after-hours fantasies are haunted by those brown eyes and that sharp tongue.
But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to be the next Russo man to take advantage of his position. I might be a second-generation asshole, but I am not my father.
She’s working herself to death at half a dozen dead-end jobs for some secret reason she doesn’t feel like sharing with me. And I’m going to fix it all. Don’t accuse me of caring. She’s nothing more than a puzzle to be solved. If I can get her to quit, I can finally peel away all those layers. Then I can go back to salvaging the family name and forget all about the dancing, beer-slinging brunette.

Ally
Ha. Hold my beer, Grumpy Grump Face.

Author’s Note: A steamy, swoony workplace romantic comedy with a grumpy boss hero determined to save the day and a plucky heroine who is starting to wonder if there might actually be a beating heart just beneath her boss’s sexy vests.

I’ve heard mixed things about this book and since Lucy Score can be kind of hit or miss for me, I was on the fence about trying it out, but I’m glad I gave it a try. This was a really cute read. The banter was a lot of fun and I really loved the grumpy/sunshine theme.

Dominic meets his mom for breakfast one morning, gets into a verbal sparring match with his waitress and demands she gets fired when she doesn’t back down. His mom ends up offering Ally a job, which she’s desperate enough to take since her father needs medical care and she’s completely broke after a series of unfortunate incidents. The vibe in the office is a little strange and Dominic is a total grump, but Ally soon finds herself getting shuffled around the office as a Jill-of-all-trades, which often keeps her in direct contact with him. Since his mom has made it clear he can’t fire Ally, she figures she has nothing to lose by giving him a hard time back.

Dominic is trying to clean up the mess his father left in the company, and he doesn’t want to do anything to make their employees feel unsafe, but he can’t help how he gravitates to Ally. She’s full of sass and sunshine, and she pulls him out of his own head. But he can’t be with her as long as she works for the company. Since he can’t fire her, he’ll just have to get her to quit….

I really love the first 3/4 of this book. The banter and sexual tension between Ally and Dominic was really good. I loved what a grump he was and how she seemed to pull him away from that. What I did not love was the way he tried to push her to quit during the last 1/4 of the book. He spent the entire book feeling kind of skeevy because his dad was a creep, yet he kept trying to force Ally to quit? She didn’t share her personal issues with him, but he knew she needed the job and still tried to force it? It went on too long and really hurt my overall enjoyment of the book the more I thought about it.

I also felt like the characters acted much younger than they were purported to be. He was in his 40s and she was close to 40, and yet they both acted kind of immature at times. They felt like they were in their 20s, not their 40s.

The book was on the long side and I got frustrated with both of them at various times throughout, but I enjoyed it as a whole. As long as I don’t think too hard about the way he acted.

Rating: 3.75 out of 5