After a bad break up Tessa Hart left Florida to take New York City by storm. Four years later things still aren't going the way she hoped. She's working part-time as a bartender while going to school to become an accountant. Money is tight so she has had a succession of roommates and the latest living arrangement has just fallen apart. Tessa longs to have her own place so that she can feel truly independent, but she just can't afford it. When her friend and boss, Gabe O'Sullivan, offers to let her crash at his apartment until she finds another place Tessa is hesitant to accept. She has never lived with a guy before and Gabe is much too sexy to fit comfortably into the role of platonic roommate. Tessa doesn't have time for men and can't afford to mess things up with the guy who has been her rock since she moved to New York, but she doesn't have any other options. Once she moves in it's only a matter of time before she and Gabe will have to deal with the attraction that's growing between them.
This is the first in the Sexy O'Sullivans trilogy about Gabe and his brothers Daniel and Sean. Gabe certainly lives up to the billing. He's good looking, kind and generous. Unfortunately, he was pretty much the only thing that I liked about the book. I felt that it had two major problems: a weakness in the writing and the character of Tessa.
The writing problem was that there was far too much tell and not enough show. This is a friends to lovers story and I never felt the friendship. There were several conversations about how Tessa and Gabe have been close for four years, but I never saw that closeness in their interactions. For example, Gabe seemed to be totally in the dark about Tessa's control issues. If they're such good friends I would expect him to know something about them.
I could probably have overlooked that, but I couldn't get past my issues with Tessa. I wanted to root for her. I can understand her desire to find herself and stand on her own two feet and I can certainly relate to her wish for a place of her own. However, I ended up feeling like Tessa was an illogical, self-involved mess and instead rooting for her I was just glad that I don't know her.
Where to begin? Tess has so many bad ideas that it's hard to list them all. Who told her that most women have their lives all figured out by the time they're 22? Why did she decide she had to be an accountant? She doesn't like it and she's bad at it. Daniel is an accountant and she sees him every week at the bar, but she's never spoken to him about his work or asked him for any insight or advice.
Then there's her attitude toward having roommates. Living with strangers is difficult and not ideal, but it's not a sign of weakness. Maybe I'm being overly sensitive because I'm living with roommates while going to grad school, but that's the thing. School is expensive and money is not infinite, so students have roommates. Most of them don't love it, but it doesn't make them losers. Where did Tessa get such a fixation on having her own apartment right now as the only way to prove that she can take care of herself?
She has a job that she's good at and she's paying her bills and keeping a roof over her head. She's independent. The fact that she doesn't see that at all was very frustrating. I kept thinking that, like so many heroines in Romancelandia, Tessa desperately needed at least one real girlfriend. Any girlfriend worth the salt on the rim of a nice big margarita would have helped Tessa sort this out long ago. That's what girlfriends are for. She needed to listen to an appropriate country song and get a clue. Instead Gabe is apparently her only friend. Why?
Then there's Tessa's dream apartment. I've never lived in New York City, but I have friends who do and I've lived in other difficult real estate markets. The idea that there is only one apartment building in all of New York where Tessa can live happily is just insane. This made the constant focus on that building a serious annoyance throughout the book.
Those were all trivial problems though compared to her approach to friendship. When you're friends with a guy and then you start sleeping with him it's good if you can remember to treat him as a friend and not some random piece of ass. I understood why she wanted to try to keep the friendship separate from the sex, but fantasy games are only fun if both people want to play. Once Gabe said that the game wasn't fun for him Tessa's insistence on continuing it was not okay. Of course, part of the blame goes to Gabe for rolling over for Tessa against his better judgment, but that lessened my respect for him far more than it excused her. Still, Gabe is an adult and he's responsible for himself so I might have been able to let that go, but there is no way that I could accept her pimping Gabe out in order to get her apartment.
If you're really good platonic friends with someone it might be acceptable to ask him to do you a favor and go out with a real estate agent to help you get your dream apartment. Once you're sleeping with the guy that really doesn't work though and, in my opinion it is never OK to go behind a friend's back to set up something like that. Worse, even after Gabe figures out what she did and tells her that it hurt him she doesn't feel bad about it and she doesn't apologize. She wouldn't do it again, but that's because she decided she wants Gabe for herself, not because she realized that decent people don't pimp out their friends and then lie about it. There is no way I can be OK with that. I also noticed that all the talk about their friendship was about what Gabe had done for Tessa. What did Tessa do for Gabe? A friendship is mutual and I never saw that between these two characters. Instead, Tessa tells Gabe that wanting him makes her feel weak and that he'll just have to suck it up and wait for her, then turns around and uses him for a booty call. I couldn't help but think that if the genders were reversed the attitude toward the situation would have been totally different.
Pimping Gabe out wasn't Tessa's only lapse in ethics. The way she manipulated her first real estate client made it seem to me that as far Tessa is concerned the ends justify the means when it comes to getting what she thinks she needs. That's not a quality that I admire. Being nice to patrons in the bar doesn't exactly make up for that. After all, they're not standing between her and something she wants. As I said, I could understand at least some of why Tessa felt she needed so much control, but she took it too far. In the end I just couldn't see Gabe ending up with her as a good thing, so as a romance this was a failure for me.
There were also a couple of annoying errors that should have been caught in editing. First, there is a reference to an al fresco painting in a building lobby. A fresco is a painting, al fresco means outdoors. Second, there is a point where Tessa is talking to her brother about the fact that her ex is getting married. He expresses surprise that she's not "balling and sniveling." Um, bawling means crying. Balling is a totally different thing. And strictly speaking Tessa actually did spend most of the book balling and sniveling, so that really needed to be corrected.
Grade: D
The next book in the trilogy is Daniel's story. His wife of less than a year was killed on 9/11 and he thinks he lost his only shot at love. This is the kind of story that requires a deft touch and I'm concerned that I won't find Ms. O'Reilly's writing up to the task. I have similar concerns about Sean's story. He comes off in this book as a bit of a skanky man ho and turning him into a worthy hero will take some effort. Still, lots of other people have enjoyed these books and it's possible that the fact that Tessa rubbed me so wrong was an isolated thing. I'll most likely try Sex, Straight Up before making up my mind how I feel about Ms. O'Reilly's writing.
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