Please note that I received this book for free via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review.
Look I don't know how many romance readers out there are familiar with that whole Plane Bae mess that went down last year. Short recap, a couple grossly violated two strangers privacy. A woman decided to spy on the people sitting together on a plane and decided that it would be great to tweet about them. During this whole thing a ridiculous amount of people followed her on Twitter and were cheering this mess on. The whole thing went viral. Buzzfeed and others picked up the story and the woman who originally tweeted (who was a writer) used this to parlay herself into fame. Of course people rightfully said this was gross, why would you be taking pictures, implying that they had sex in a bathroom (they didn't) and use this to push yourself forward. It was awful and I think people on both sides of this mess were yelling at each other. The poor woman in question who was spied on had to delete her social media. The main in question was all, heh, this is good for my brand (I think he may have been an Instagram model. No I don't understand how that's a thing). I think within 7 days the whole thing had boomeranged with people who initially thought this was cute realizing it wasn't and the whole thing was messed up.
So the above is what Rai sets up as her big plot. The heroine (Katrina King) goes to a cafe where she let's a stranger sit at her table. She's polite, but not interested cause she has a crush on her bodyguard (Jas Singh). The main at the table asks her out, she turns him down. She notes that a woman next to her is typing furiously and thinks nothing of it. The next day she finds out a twitter hashtag called #cafebae has taken off and a woman had taken a picture of the side of her face and talked about how it was true love between her and the stranger at the table. This causes issues due to Katrina's past (she suffers from panic attacks) and she is scared that her anonymity which she treasures is about to blown to bits. Jas takes her to his family's farm where they grow peaches and then romance romance romance. Honestly the book did not work for me at all.
I think Katrina was just too nice. I really hated the outcome of the whole plane bae thing. I was hoping that Rai would tackle that more in the story. Instead if was talked about here, talked about somewhat here, and then just dealt with in a way that I doubt would have resolved itself in real life. Katrina also had another thing happen to her in this book and it was just too much after a while. I think I was supposed to go all girl power, but it started to read a bit too Lifetime for me.
Jas was an interesting hero, but once again there was a lot going on with him too. I think the plane bae thing should have been dropped since the story could have just focused on how similar these to are (both dealing with past trauma) though Jas had a loving family though his grandfather is ticked at him somewhat. I just started to feel like I was getting four stories worth of information in this book and it was too much.
We get previous characters we were introduced to returns in this one, but once again they felt apart from the main story at times.
The writing was okay, the flow was hit or miss for me after a while though.
The ending had a nice Happily Ever After (HEA) I thought, but once again we have another hero that is dealing with some really serious stuff that I don't think gets fully addressed by the end of the book.
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