This is just another book that reiterates for me how hit or miss I feel with Mary Calmes. Some of her books I absolutely love and some are just meh. This fell very clearly into the meh category. I didn't hate it, but there wasn't anything particularly gripping about it. It's a short quick read so for that it's beneficial.

Julian Nash is a little bit of an oddity, but his partnership with his best friend Cash Vega has taken them up the corporate ladder at their marketing firm. Their unique style and ideas has endeared them to their clients and brought a great push of business into the company. Stumbling in on the guy he's been seeing for the last couple of weeks sleeping with another guy in the company isn't exactly the way he wanted to spend his promotion night dinner, but he'd still rather know than not. Having drool worthy Ryan Dean show up and defend him feels like icing on the cake. The least he can do is invite him along as his date to the dinner instead.

Ryan Dean has had his eye on Julian for awhile, but the man has never returned any of his calls after the promotional pieces they'd done together have passed. He has a successful local cable show and after working with Julian Ryan is determined to get more. He's heard Julian doesn't sleep around, but he's going to make sure that Julian is coming home with him that night. Ultimately though there's more than meets the eye when it comes to Ryan's background.

Reading this made me feel like I was getting the unpolished versions of Mary Calmes usual character tropes. The unaware, everyone wants him and will do anything to have him, ultra-attractive guy strangely was paired as the alpha dominant type in this story which is unusual for her writing. But at the same time Ryan was written with some of those characteristics too. He just had the twinkier vibe. And that's why at times this really didn't work for me. I felt like the characters were inconsistent and how they dealt with things felt backwards most of the time. Parts of their personalities felt interchangeable and then the parts that weren't felt like they were oft times on the wrong guy. I really disliked how Julian completely abandoned his "no sex until we're together" stance pretty much immediately with Ryan. The worst type of insta-love for me. I so badly wanted him to stand up to Ryan and hold out.

Not to mention that the paranormal/urban fantasy elements of this story really don't enter in until the three quarter mark. This feels like a normal contemporary until just before the end with maybe one little teaser somethings different comment made at the halfway point. Of course when the shit does hit the fan everyone accepts it with a grain of salt. Ok, so demons, sure yeah, totally cool. With the introduction of those elements though there just wasn't enough time left in the story to really give any clarity to anything. I was left slightly confused with dangling threads abounding. Warders, yeah ok, got it. What are those? How are they decided upon? What exactly do they do regularly? Special powers? Or are they just kick ass with blades? So many many questions.

Was there a connection between these two guys? Sure. Mary Calmes always writes this incredible flaring heat between her leads, but that's where she gets in to trouble with me a lot of the time. I want more than just incredible heat. I want to see things develop between my MC's. This flared up and is instantly everything in the world is perfect. It's just not believable, even in the realm of urban fantasy when the fantasy elements are barely there in the first place.

This read fast and smoothly. But I was left underwhelmed.