What I appreciated most is that the obstacle is not played as a scandal. The gap in their ages matters, but Cate is more interested in the two things it stands for: his fear that wanting something makes him someone he does not recognise, and her fear that staying for a man would cancel the future she has been scraping together. That is a much better engine than forbidden-for-the-sake-of-it, and it keeps the middle of the book tense without any fake breakups invented to fill time.

Alexander is the reason it works. He is not a brooding billionaire borrowed from a hundred other books, he is a man who has been avoiding attachments for so long that he has no vocabulary for wanting one, and his attempts to talk himself out of Sunny are the funniest and saddest parts of the whole thing. Sunny gives as good as she gets, and the fact that she is genuinely young rather than simply younger than him keeps the power balance interesting.

The heat is not subtle and Cate is not trying to make it subtle, so if you want a slow-burn that stays closed-door, this is not the book for you. Harley Quinn Smith and Aaron Shedlock handle the switches between banter and tension well, and ten hours is a generous length for a romance of this shape, though it does mean the last third takes its time. My one reservation is a matter of taste rather than construction: the small-town subplot involving Sunny's mother is thinner than everything around it, and I found myself waiting to get back to the pool house whenever it took over.

If you like the way Cate writes complicated people doing the wrong thing beautifully, The Daddy's Girl is the closest neighbour in her backlist, and Promise Me is the one to pick if you want the same heat with a colder edge. This is a romance about two people learning that being wanted is not the same as being trapped, and it earns its ending.