An attorney with an "anti-romance stance" who moonlights as a wedding officiant meets a sports events manager who lands himself in the wedding planning business. They make for an oddly endearing couple in Do You Take This Man, a contemporary opposites-attract romance from Denise Williams (The Fastest Way to Fall; How to Fail at Flirting).
RJ is a high-powered divorce attorney with no confidence in the lasting power of love, despite the words she recites as an in-demand wedding officiant whose first ceremony goes viral. Lear is a bruised, newly single event planner working for his cousin's wedding planning business while he figures out his next steps in life. The two are far from compatible, yet their disdain for each other seems to spark something between them as their work lives are thrown together over the course of several months. When that spark ignites, the two agree to an "enemies with benefits" arrangement in the bedroom: "We made each other feel good, and then we went back to veiled contempt [at work]."
Romance readers will know where Williams is taking this set-up from the first pages of Do You Take This Man but, as with all of the best romance reads, knowing where it will end does nothing to subtract from the clever twists and turns it takes to get there. As their relationship evolves, RJ and Lear must learn to take down the many walls they've put up against love in the name of self-protection and decide if there's something, after all, to what they sell to their wedding clients--the idea of lasting romance. --Kerry McHugh, freelance reviewer