The Bought-and-Paid-for Wife Book

3.5

My favorite of the series so far. Vanessa Thorpe is a widow, a former trophy-wife who is not the gold digger and social climber that her husband's son, Tristan seems to think she is. He'll do whatever it takes to get the inheritance he is due, to set things right. Tristan starts out as a bit of an ass. He rushes to a snap judgement about Vanessa and pretty much treats her like crap, but he redeems himself very quickly. It was nice to see him constantly re-evaluating his opinion of her, not because of the attraction between them but because of her personality and other obvious signs. He didn't continue to live in denial, as so many heroes do. Vanessa was just okay for me. They had a good relationship, but I didn't feel a lot of chemistry and UST between them. There was definitely an attraction, but it was subtle and there wasn't a lot of sexual tension so much as there was personality tension. While this was very well written and plotted out nicely, I do kind of wish the story had ended with a more definitive happy ending. This was still happy, but was a lot more hopeful and didn't firmly establish the heroine's feelings.