Nate recognizes the quiet woman at the coffee shop as the sex columnist, but it isn't until he eavesdrops on her conversation with a friend about needing a date for a week at a sex resort that he decides it's time to make his move. So, he's surprised when he gets "sexy" Désirée instead of coffee shop Rae, and rather than telling her he likes her, he instead decides to play along with the "sexy" act and see if he get her to admit it's all an act.
“With her hair curling around her face instead of tied up in a scrunchy, Rae did appear a lot more glamorous. Even under the worst conditions, she wasn’t bad looking. With Carla’s help, she could be downright pretty. But the problem was all of this was fake.”
Rae isn't comfortable as either her everyday self or her "sexy" counterpart Désirée. She's obsessed with being this caricature of "sexiness," which as far as I can tell, involved having perfectly done makeup and revealing clothes she was uncomfortable in - basically an external version of a stereotypical male fantasy. Normally I'd be all in for an initially unlikeable insecure woman who learns to love herself, but goodness, Rae was just over the top obnoxious and awful to Nate, and seemed to have no clue as to how unfair she was being to him. The sex scenes were hot, but I had a hard time reconciling how they acted with each other outside of the bedroom. Also, for a sex resort, it was all very vanilla, even The Barn, which was a letdown after all the hype.
Honestly, after struggling to get around 60% in, I skimmed the rest, mostly just to see if Nate would get finally get fed up with Rae. Unfortunately, this was just not the book for me.
I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.