The Undercover Billionaire by Jackie Ashenden Release Date: March 27, 2018 Publisher: St. Martin’s Book #3 in the Tate Brothers series Number of Pages: 324 Mass Market Paperback Source: Warren Public Library Contemporary Romance/Military M/F Rating: XXX Read 7/6/18 to 7/12/18
Note to self: Don’t start a paperback book you’ve been looking forward to reading when you know you won’t have a lot of daytime reading time. Honestly, it really annoyed me that I didn’t have time to just sit and read this one. I’ve loved this whole series and my real-world commitments were messing with the pacing since I was forced to put it down again and again.
In case you can’t tell from the above paragraph, I really enjoyed this story. And moreover, I really loved this series overall. Wolf was the final piece to the Tate puzzle and it’s hard to believe this action and emotion pack story took place over just a few days total. It helps that Wolf and Olivia already know each other so it wasn’t what would be considered insta-love in my eyes. They’ve known each other for many years. Even if they haven’t seen each other in many years, they do keep up over email a bit. And the beginning of their friendship as teens was a pretty intense time for both of them so their friendship was cemented at a young age.
Although each of the books in this series can be read alone, it will be such a better experience if you read them all. Better yet, have them all on hand and ready to go and read them in order, one after the other. I really wish I had read them back to back to back myself. I imagine that would have been quite a fabulous experience.
But back to this story in particular. Poor Wolf has been used by pretty much everyone in his life for his whole life. He has such a bone deep need for family yet he that need blinds him from what a family really is (hint, it has nothing to do with DNA). In some ways, Olivia has the same issues. She has a family, but has never really felt wanted by them. She’s gone through life doing what every expects so as not to rock the boat and lose the little bit of affection she does get.
As much as Olivia struggles to get Wolf to see her as that family he feels is always just out of reach, she is blind to her own struggles. And while Wolf is aware that Olivia’s father is not the man she thinks he is, he is NOT aware of how deeply her father’s indifference has seeped into Olivia’s bones. Which means that even though he knows he’s hurting her, he doesn’t realize quite how deep the cut is going for her.
As usual, this author brings the heat and passion. She really knows how to write those steamy scenes, that’s for sure. And her storytelling is spot on here for the most part, although I would have loved a complete wrap up of the series as a whole. I’m not exactly sure I’ve had closure. There aren’t any big cliffhanger stories left dangling, but it just didn’t seem complete. So who knows, maybe I’m wrong and this isn’t the last we’ll see of the Tates.
