Wife by Wednesday by Catherine Bybee

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Continuing my mini-binge to finish the first board of Love Has Sprung, I needed a fake dating romance. I went through a couple different listopia lists and realized I have quite a few on my massive tbr. I randomly chose Wife by Wednesday by Catherine Bybee. This is the first book in her Weekday Brides series. I was also able to apply this to the prompt Cardigan (clothes on the cover) for the Taylor Swift Quarterly Challenge.

Sam runs a matchmaking service for the rich and famous. Her new client is Blake, a real life, modern day duke. When Blake is intrigued more by Sam than her prospective matches, he pushes for her to be his wife. They quickly elope and plan how the next year will go. Blake needs her to stay married to him long enough to secure the entailments of his title and be able to support his mother and younger sister. Blake's father's lawyers are looking for it to be a sham, so they must really be a team in all situations. When the attraction between them builds, it becomes easier and easier to "play" in front of the cameras and others.

I haven't read very many modern day royalty books, and that was a fun surprise. I knew there was a bit of fake-dating going in since I selected this specifically for that prompt, but I was really into this. It definitely had a little bit of a quicker pacing and felt a little insta-love, but I didn't think it felt too out of place here. The situations that Blake and Samantha find themselves in really helps them push to stay open and honest with each other to make the best out of their new relationship; the sexual attraction between them certainly helped as well.

Now this wasn't quite a full 5-stars for me because I felt there was a little bit too much extra plot going on, especially for this being a shorter novel. We had the jealous (and manipulative) ex-f-buddy, Blake's greedy cousin (that inherited if Blake didn't get married) and then his father's horrible lawyers. We also found out that Blake's father was horrendous himself and even had secret provisions that were to be revealed when he got married. It just didn't really sound legal to me, but I don't know much about British entitlement law in the modern day.

Overall I enjoyed this quick read and will definitely be checking out Catherine's other books in this series. I think they are all going to be matchmaking type situations, but I'm not 100% sure. I haven't looked at the blurbs, but will when I'm actually looking at picking up the book. There's just too many books and not enough time. I definitely want to try more of Catherine's works though outside this series to see what other tropes and ideas she'll play with.

Have you read Wife by Wednesday?

Bookishly Yours,

Stasi🍎

STATISTICS: Wife by Wednesday, Catharine Bybee, 4-stars, 1 day, eBook, 223 pages, published in 2011, indie published