What is wrong meets what feels right in this romance set in Italy by the Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author of Deep End.

Maya Killgore is twenty-three and still in the process of figuring out her life.

Conor Harkness is thirty-eight, and Maya cannot stop thinking about him.

“Older guy. Your brother’s friend. So fucking trite, isn’t it?”

It’s such a cliché, it almost makes her heart implode: older man and younger woman; successful biotech guy and struggling grad student; brother’s best friend and the girl he never even knew existed. As Conor loves to remind her, the power dynamic is too imbalanced. Any relationship between them would be problematic in too many ways to count, and Maya should just get over him. After all, he has made it clear that he wants her gone from his life.

But not everything is as it seems – and clichés sometimes become plot twists.

When Maya’s brother decides to get married in Taormina, she and Conor end up stuck together in a romantic Sicilian villa for over a week. There, on the beautiful Ionian coast, between ancient ruins, delicious foods, and natural caves, Maya realizes that Conor might be hiding something from her. And as the destination wedding begins to erupt out of control, she decides that a summer fling might be just what she needs – even if it’s a problematic one.

“You built a nice adulthood over the ruins of a shitty adolescence,” my therapist once said, and I enjoy the mental image of it. The idea of life as something I could choose, cultivate day by day, curate and nurture. Being mindful, instead of reactive.

The romance was bland, the story characters were uni-dimmensional and the date scenes very awkward. I did read the book but at the end I couldn’t remember anything afterwards.

It’s awkward, too. People try to put forward their best traits, but a lot is at stake, and they are nervous, which is counterproductive. It’s the trial-run nature of it. Like there’s something to prove, a new level to graduate to. The need to discover whether a subeffective dose of someone you barely know might be compatible with your system, then slowly increase the intake, see if your organism tolerates it…it’s the kind of shit you do to get accustomed to poisons.

So the fling is between a more “mature” guy and a young girl who falls in love with him and pursues him over 5-8 years.

He says no, but in the end still accepts her advances and sleeps with her. And then he gets all “oh, no, what have I done, you’re so young and I’m so old! But hey, I want to have kids with you because I’m of a certain age!”

Part of me would love nothing more than to have you there as I deal with this mess. Then there’s the other part, the part that would really like for you to consider mixing your genetic material to mine at some point in the future, which is terrified of showing you the depravity and greed that runs in my family.