Fantastic category romance, full of yearning and soapy drama. Adelaide is a great example of the "screwed-up heiress trying to prove herself to her family" heroine and Michael, notably, is not a billionaire but someone who works for a living (as a PR guy) and seems believably successful/competent at it. There are a lot of nice food descriptions. There's the usual rollercoaster of can we be together/oh no we can't. There is a great dressing-down from an angry powerhouse grandma.

I'm really fascinated by how much I enjoyed this book, because (full disclosure) I hated the last book of Lee's I tried to read - in part because of its over-the-top plotting. I think she may be an author who, at least right now, for me as a reader works best in category romance settings, where the characters are permitted to be over-the-top jerks for plot reasons and the drama dial can be turned up to thirteen. For a category romance especially, Michael was definitely not an over-the-top jerk, and Adelaide was easy to empathize with, but there are definitely the usual category romance "oh we can never be together" drama moments and communications issues that wouldn't fly in a more realistic contemporary.

Content warnings:

Spoiler

about halfway through the book Lee decides to bring up infertility (male), which is both weird - Adelaide is in her mid-twenties and at no point have the two of them discussed whether they even want children; we also didn't have any inkling this was an issue of Michael's - and kind of jarring, because it's not like there isn't enough else going on between them without adding that particular plot point. There isn't a ton of attention devoted to it; it just gets kind of thrown in periodically after it's first brought up as yet another reason they can't be together. Additionally, towards the end the heroine's brother punches the hero in the face (for upsetting his sister). It's presented as totally understandable and no one holds a grudge about it (the hero and brother are best friends), but I find casual violence not very fun.