This causes an emotional tug-a-war as Evie fights against wanting to sleep with Merrick and remaining professional. Merrick and Evie cannot help but be attracted to each other. It equates to a makeover montage in a rom-com movie: delicious. Those moments when he’s dealing with his emotional baggage are my favorites of Vi Keeland’s romances. Yes, he’s irresistible, funny, smug, and handsome, but he must do some work to be worthy of his heroine. This is my particular version of romance catnip: a seemingly strong hero who is actually in need of a big journey to truly find himself.

Merrick is the true messy one because he’s hidden his pain behind his work.

In doing so, she challenges him to become a better version of himself. Evie enforces her boundaries about love even when you want these two to be together. I love a heroine who knows herself, warts and all, and is savvy and intelligent to expect the same from her hero.

As she challenges Merrick, she becomes the impetus for his evolution. She seems so messy, but she’s self-aware. So what are the distinct reasons to read this book? This journey becomes the emotional catalyst for falling in love with Keeland’s The Boss Project.

As Evie and Merrick begin to fall for each other, Evie challenges his ways, and Merrick’s protections are inadequate. His job has become the thing that he hides behind instead of processing the experiences of his past. She holds an emotional maturity as a therapist that allows her to process her situation (a cheating ex-fiance, the need for a new place to live, a new job) more meaningfully than Merrick, who we find throughout the story has erected a steel wall to protect against his emotions. By the way, this is a norm of Keeland’s workplace romances.Īs The Boss Project evolves, though, we find out quickly that Evie is really more put together than Merrick. The next time, it’s in front of his desk where he presents a fairly smug and callous version of himself. She encounters Merrick the first time, half undressed in a fitting room. Evie begins this story in a complete wreck, jumping from interview to interview hoping someone will take a chance on her.

And it’s a ruse, a humorous turn that inevitably moves into deeper, darker issues that pull at your emotional heartstrings. It’s her hook, the manna offering of her romances.

In an innocuous beginning, Keeland entices her readers into her stories usually with heroines in a dither and heroes in control of themselves. “‘I, uh, was eating cherries.” And so begins Vi Keeland’s delectable The Boss Project. “But you can’t appreciate the beauty in someone without seeing the ugly.”

The Boss Project by Vi Keeland