Beautiful pianist Rio finds herself falling in love with her best friend's brother, the powerful shipping magnate Lysandros. On the very night that she decides to give herself to him, she is assaulted by another man, and it traumatizes her to the point where she breaks things off with Lysandros completely, unable to give him an explanation as to why. Six weeks later, her BFF Xena is in a terrible car accident, resulting in amnesia. Lysandros asks Rio to accompany Xena back to Greece to help her recover, and proposes that they enter into a fake engagement to surround Xena with happiness, coaxing her memory back. Once she recovers, they'll break up for good...if they can.

This is my first HQN "Presents," and it's obvious from the start that this is a line of pure fantasy, with glitz, glamour, drama, and foreign accents. Everyone is impossibly rich and cultured, and live their lives on a completely different planet that us mere mortals. Alpha males and innocent girls abound, matched together in purely ludicrous circumstances. This sort of thing has limited appeal for me, but I am a sucker for second-chance romances, so I pulled the trigger on this book, and its tropey goodness did not let me down.

Sometimes you just have to meet a novel where it is, and adjust your expectations accordingly. This is not the best story I've ever read, or the best treatment of any of these tropes. It is very simply plotted and very simply written, with an almost irritating emphasis on Rio's "innocence" and her virginity and how cold and emotionally unavailable Lysandros is, but when the writer gets out of her own way, she weaves an emotional story about two people who are afraid of putting themselves out there and being rejected. It is a base fear that we all have, so watching it play out not once, but twice over, is alluring.

This is pure id-fic, and on that level, it works. It satisfies a craving for my favorite guilty pleasures. Sometimes you just have a fever, and the only solution is more cowbell. ( )