Every girl with a brother grows up with one fundamental rule: his best friend is off limits. That’s one rule she longs to break when he crashes into her life.
Amelie Weston has been taking the safe path for as long as she can remember. Not disappointing her parents by pursuing the career she wants. And not pursuing the guy she’s been crushing on.
But she’s tired of being the good girl.
Her brother’s best friend is pushing her to stop being a people pleaser and open the bakery of her dreams. Little does he know he’s also at the top of the list of her heart’s greatest desires… and he’s making himself impossible to resist.
Levi Kingston fully intends to become a legend on the field as one of the best players ever. He must stay focused and work relentlessly toward his goal. He doesn’t have time for distractions… until he meets his best friend’s sister, and his well-laid plan is challenged.
Bad timing, responsibilities, and loyalty to her brother keep them apart. But the connection between them only grows stronger. Their feelings become impossible to ignore, and the fight against them is pointless.
Will they take a chance on love? Or waste an opportunity for long-awaited happiness?
Amelie is a people pleaser, so she’s going to college for accounting, even though she’s a gifted baker and wants to run her own bakery. She’s not happy but wants to make her parents proud so she has to be the rule follower while her brother gets to live his dream of playing professional football. When she meets her brother’s best friend, Levi, there’s an instant connection between them but they both acknowledge that the other is off-limits, until they can’t fight it anymore. Levi doesn’t care about the rules and just wants to be together, but she pushes him away at every turn. I liked Amelie right away and understood her initial hesitance since she was only seventeen but started to get frustrated as they got older and she didn’t step up.
Her family might be disappointed but they loved her and would get over it. There was no indication that they would cut her off or treat her badly and there was no trauma or anything to explain why she refused to go after what she wanted. That made it a bit tough to keep rooting for her, especially since Levi had endless patience and seemed determined to wait for her forever, even if she never came around. They went in and out of one another’s lives for years but it was mostly Amelie pushing him away for reasons that weren’t made clear.
I liked the characters, especially Levi, but there was too much angst here for me, especially since there didn’t seem to be any real reason for it. The dialogue is a bit stilted too and didn’t seem natural, but that was probably more a function of editing than the writing style. Still, the characters were compelling enough that I wanted to see it through and I did enjoy their ending. I received an ARC from Grey’s Promotions in exchange for an honest review.
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