This story opens with a scene of in which our soon-to-be-hero Dylan deliberately causes such an excruciating public humiliation for our adoring heroine Sadie, that I wondered how the author kept herself from having a truck hit him in the next scene, while Sadie gleefully runs off with.…I dunno, Brad Pitt or someone like that. Except Sadie was only 17, so make it the lead singer of Hansen, or whoever it was teenage girls loved in 1994.Fastforward about 13 years. Sadie is now a gorgeous and very successful story producer at a hit soap opera. But another excruciating public humiliation is about to come along -- being dumped at the altar. And right after this comes the news -- her old crush and nemesis Dylan, now a writer, has been hired to work directly under her. As you might guess, Sadie has never forgotten or forgiven. But here comes the interesting part -- neither has Dylan. In fact, both of these two have reason to believe the other did them wrong.Mayberry is great at depicting enemies to lovers, and the sparks between these two are blazing. But after the initial terrific backstory, I found the book to have lots of sizzle, but not quite enough bacon. There's sex and sex and then for a change some more sex -- it's the first time I've ever been bored by sex scenes in a Mayberry book. Not because it's badly written, but because there doesn't seem enough to support it. Sadie keeps trying and utterly failing to break things off with Dylan, and I felt like this was because there wasn't much to say about them as a couple other than they loved to have sex. The strong emotional punch of the beginning kind of trails off at the end.I still found it entertaining, and the next books are nicely set up by the strong friendship shown between Sadie and her two best friends and coworkers. I also really liked Sadie's reunion with her dumping ex, in which we got to see her feelings for him -- so often the ex is just a plot point and it's easy to see the heroine never really cared about him to begin with. In this case, the guy is definitely redeemable and I honestly wouldn't have been dissatisfied if they'd gotten back together. Maybe we'll get a book for him someday.
