At the end of my review for The Wedding Date, I said that if Guillory wanted to write a book about Carlos, Drew’s mischievous colleague, I would be there. Guillory gave the people what they wanted: a charming doctor with a taco habit.
Nik is calmly minding her business at a Dodger game with her boyfriend of five months. She’s not so into baseball, but it’s what he wanted to do for his birthday. The boyfriend uses the opportunity to propose marriage via the Jumbotron, which Nik shuts down as politely as she can. Carlos and his sister rescue Nik from an intrusive camera crew in the aftermath before things go left. There are sparks and away we go…
I liked this sequel more than The Wedding Date (which I also gave four stars), but it shares some of the same elements. Once again, the couple struggles to communicate and that is the source of most of their problems. Both Carlos and Nik go into this relationship looking for something casual, but don’t actually talk about their expectations until long past the point when they really should have made that clear to one another.
As much as I dislike failed communication in romance stories, I give Guillory a lot of credit for how she uses it here. She makes it very honest, and it’s easy to see why both Carlos and Nik choose to withhold when they do. When Carlos doesn’t bring up his concerns that Nik might be getting too serious, Guillory is careful to make the reader understand why he chooses not to say something. It’s harder to fault a character who has valid reasons for not rocking the boat, even if you can see around the corner to how that’s going to be a problem. (And, yeah, it blows up in their faces just like you predicted.)
I really, really loved both Nik and Carlos in this, even if Carlos is a little too much in his family’s business. We get a glimpse of Drew and Alexa, but not so much that a reader would feel out of the loop without the first book.