Published October 2025 via Love Inspired
★★
Ooohh but the righteous misogynist vibes in this one are strong.
I meant to write a full review, but motivation is lacking, so I'll keep it short: at one point the Dark History Heroine (DHH) describes the Righteous Hero (RH) as "a strongly moral man with a judgmental streak a mile wide" (90), and that...seems about right. He's quick to judge, quick to assume, slow to believe what DHH tells him, and slow to forgive. He also 1) makes DHH's employment contingent on her answering invasive personal questions about her health and 2) spends most of the book alternately kissing DHH, who again is his employee, and suggesting that she's not good enough to take care of his daughter—in other words, making her already tenuous employment and housing situation ever more uncertain. Ooh, and then he blames her for not telling him sooner about things that have no bearing on her job that she was correctly afraid would make him kick her out. (Naturally RH then goes full whiplash and tells DHH that he wants to marry her, all before they're even in a relationship.)
The interesting part is that other characters call RH out all the time—DHH does repeatedly (RH always has a comeback for her, including that since she's taking care of his daughter—which he has hired her to do—it is reasonable for him to discipline her son and then expect DHH to apologize for being upset by this, what the actual fuck), but so do both her family and his. Mostly, RH listens to the family; mostly, he does not listen to DHH.
While it's nice that he eventually listens to people who aren't DHH and decides that she isn't a morally bankrupt liar who is only "pretending to be a decent human being" (162), it would be a lot nicer if that came more than about ten pages before he proposed, and a lot nicer if any of this came about because he trusted DHH rather than only the people around her.
So much for a short review. Moving on now...
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