Ray:
- Rule #1 of almost dying: Make sure someone knows your passwords. It’s hard to cancel your phone plan if you’re dead.
- Rule #2 of almost dying: Make sure your house is clean before you walk up the steps to the pearly gates. It makes selling off your life easier.
Back-up plans are for people who plan on losing.
All it took was eight seconds for me to win the biggest competition of my life, and one second to lose everything except that championship buckle.
I had left my family’s cattle ranch at eighteen with no intention of ever coming back for good.
Now I was back, stuck in a wheelchair with a beautiful disaster attempting to burn my house down.
Brooke:
- Rule #1 of trying to not get fired: Don’t piss off the grumpy bull rider.
- Rule #2 of trying to not get fired: When you do get fired, keep your chin up. The grumpy bull rider was hot.
It was just a little fire. Tiny, even. But that didn’t change the fact that Ray Griffith didn’t want me anywhere near him.
But we came to an agreement: I ignore him, and he doesn’t fire me.
Easy, right? Not so much when we can’t keep our hands off each other.
Release Date: Dec 16, 2025
Series: The Griffith Brothers
Book: 2
Heat Level: Hot
Publisher: Penguin Group
Imprint: Berkley (Print Only)
Price: $5.99 / 19.00 (Print)
My first Maggie Gates book was a dud, and I wanted it to be so much more.
Originally pitched as a grumpy x sunshine trope book, this quickly became difficult to read, as the chemistry between the two main characters is based solely on insta-attraction, and there’s no reason for me to see our male lead, Ray, fall for a woman who can’t even cook a reheated meal.
Let me back up. This is my first Gates novel and the first time I’ve picked up a Griffith Brothers book. There are more before this, and maybe I would’ve been more invested in Ray and his story if I’d read the others. But regardless of how much I could empathize with Ray, who is a paraplegic and is trying to work his way back to living a semblance of a normal life, I could not relate to the FMC.
Brooke is the modern-day TSTL. She seems like this caricature of all the buzzwords assigned to different tropes, as if making her this way was checking off a box. Besides being unable to take care of her vehicle, almost getting fired for administering the wrong meds to her home health patient, and being unable to cook anything, Brooke supposedly is biding her time as she waits to turn 25 so she can access a trust fund. Are you still with me? She’s got horrible roommates taking advantage of her, and when offered an awesome job as Ray’s home health aide (because he scares off everyone else), she keeps showing up for the paycheck and begging him not to fire her, even though she can’t do a single thing worthwhile.
Don’t get me started on the lack of chemistry that’s based on insta-lust because Brooke has a rocking body, and Ray has some weird protective instinct for the walking disaster. By the time we get to their first hook-up scene, everything was reading forced, and technically, he’s her employer, and I couldn’t take any more.
I won’t lie, I kept pushing to get through this longer than I should’ve. I kept waiting for the moment where Brooke would admit she played a game pretending she was completely inept or where the author would reveal that, behind her sunny exterior, she actually had a head for numbers… anything. By the time I walked away, I was angry for entertaining myself with the possibility that this could’ve gotten better. I would steer clear of this one.
~ Landra