Rating: 🤩

If anyone can get me to not just like but love a book with a heavy dose of the miscommunication trope, it’s Talia Hibbert. In her novella Guarding Temptation, both Nina and her brother’s best friend James are into each other in a serious way—but neither of them actually know that until the end of the book.

We meet the characters fresh after a hookup, where Nina thinks her longtime crush is finally coming to fruition. At least until James looks guilty as hell and tells her it was a mistake. She angrily leaves and they don’t speak for weeks, until she shows up at the auto shop he works at needing help. Because our leftist journalist heroine is in danger.

The major miscommunication—which isn’t a spoiler to say, I don’t think—is that while Nina has had a “love him, then leave him” mentality with other men, she’s in love with James. Which of course he doesn’t know. And James, while he does feel some guilt over loving Nina, it’s not because he sees her as just a kid or that he’s just not into her, it’s because he assumes being intimate with Nina is not what his best friend had in mind when he told him to look after her. He also wants to be more than just a passing fancy to the woman of his dreams.

Did I kind of want to shake them about halfway through when they were sorta kinda almost hooking up without openly talking about their feelings and dealing with the miscommunication? 100%. But did Hibbert also manage to write such fully-rounded characters in a novella that it made sense to me why they’d be hesitant? Also 100%.

It helped that, like any Talia Hibbert book, there was humor, heart, and also a good dose of well-written smut. All in a short and sweet package you can read in one sitting.