A down-on-her-luck Napa heiress suggests a mutually beneficial marriage of convenience to a man she can't stand... only to discover there's a fine line between love and hate.
After losing her job and her fiancé in one fell swoop, Natalie Vos returned home to lick her wounds. A few months later, she's sufficiently drowned her sorrows in cabernet and she's ready to get back on her feet. She just needs her trust fund to finance her new business venture. Unfortunately, the terms require she marry before she can have the money. And well, dumped, remember? But Natalie is desperate enough to propose to a man who makes her want to kill him--and kiss him, in equal measure.
August Cates may own a vineyard, but he doesn't know jack about making wine. He's determined to do his late best friend proud, no matter what it takes. Except his tasting room is empty, his wine is disgusting (seriously, he once saw someone gag), and his buddy's legacy is circling the drain. No bank will give him the loan he needs to turn the business around... and then the gorgeous, feisty heiress knocks on his door. Natalie has haunted his dreams since the moment they met, but their sizzling chemistry immediately morphed into simmering insults.
Now, a quickie marriage could help them both. A sham wedding, a few weeks living under the same roof, and then they can go their separate ways--assuming they make it out alive. How hard could it be? There's just one thing they didn't account for: their unfortunate, unbearable, undeniable attraction.
By removing the need for August and Natalie to get married on both sides and not just one, it became much more than a marriage of convenience, and it avoided having only one person hiding a big secret and trapping the other. They both wanted to get married and used the other person needing the marriage to convince themselves they could go through with it. I was left feeling less icky and annoyed by the entire situation.
I’m also impressed that Bailey managed to include so much miscommunication without making me hate her. It helps so much that August always appears to be doing everything he can to serve others. He’s sarcastic and rarely thinks before he speaks, but he’s incredibly good at stopping in a moment and pushing for honesty. It’s that slight adjustment that avoids the usual ‘if they literally spent five more minutes talking, we wouldn’t have to deal with this drama’ that is so common in similar narratives. But the reason it works so well here is because Natalie is usually willing to meet August in this honesty and let down a little more of her guard.
While I did like Hallie and Julian, I found August and Natalie much more compelling. They had such rich histories it was easy to see them as real people. When they messed up in their relationship, it was frustrating, but their motivations were clear and rarely came from a bad place.
Absolutely zero percent of anything in this series would happen in real life. I may have loved August and Natalie’s relationship and how they connected with each other, but I’m under no allusion that this is realistic. But that probably just made Unfortunately Yours more enjoyable. Who doesn’t love a far-fetched contemporary romance with a happily ever after?