The Deal Maker by Louise Bay

Louise Bay has a good number of contemporary romances out in the world, but The Deal Maker is the first one I’ve read – although based on my enjoyment it won’t be my last. The story follows the familiar romance trope of wedding party attendants forced into close proximity to plan the perfect wedding for their friends/family and discovering their own attraction to each other.

Lucy Jones’s sister, Katherine, the perfect sister, is getting married. As the maid of honor, Lucy is hoping that the time she spends planning her part of the festivities will get their mother to stop focusing on the fact that Lucy is single, thirty, and can never quite live up to her mother’s expectations for her. Katherine is getting married to Ed, who is from a good Boston family, can trace his genealogy back several generations and who happens to be as perfect as Katherine is. Their mother constantly compares Lucy to Katherine (never in a good way), but the wedding should give everyone the chance to ignore her and focus on the bride.

Ed’s best man is his business partner, Hunter Bain, who is focused on keeping the business going while Ed is distracted with all the wedding preparations. (He can’t wait for the wedding to be over and for Ed to get back to actual work.) Lucy and Hunter’s first meeting is not a meet-cute, despite the fact that Katherine and Ed seem to want them to like each other. Hunter gets drunk at Katherine and Ed’s engagement party (not intentionally, he just needed something to cope with work stress) and Lucy’s the one that bails him out. As a result, she finagles him into helping plan the joint Bachelor and Bachelorette party that Katherine and Ed want. Katherine also admits that she would really like to see Lucy and Hunter hit it off romantically, and desperate (again) to give Katherine what she wants, Lucy tells a little white lie that she and Hunter are dating. Thrown reluctantly into each other’s company and suddenly in a fake relationship, Lucy and Hunter discover that once their initial dislike of each other subsides, they actually kind of like one another, resulting in a steamy affair. But once the party and the wedding are over, will Lucy and Hunter’s relationship be over too?

My favourite part of the story is Hunter being so encouraging and supportive of Lucy. He witnesses for himself the disparaging remarks that Lucy’s mother makes to her, about anything and everything, how Lucy takes it all in, and how every time, it diminishes her enjoyment of a situation. He’s determined to help Lucy see that she is pretty and smart and fun to be with and to learn how to ignore her mother and stick up for herself. I love seeing supportive partnerships, and even if Hunter and Lucy are faking their dating relationship, it’s nonetheless pretty clear that they are falling for each other. Also interesting is that despite the façade of perfection, we’re shown that Katherine and Ed are actually human and that they have disagreements and differing opinions and aren’t always in sync, facts which made me believe their marriage will be more real than at first glance. The relationship between the sisters also strengthens through the course of the story as they figure out how to put on a united front in their interactions with their mother instead of letting her dictate their sibling relationship. Overall, the combination of engaging and well-rounded characters combined with banter and a sexy romance leads me to recommend this story to contemporary romance readers and to seek out the author’s backlist for myself!