Sunny Shelly’s Review: Kissing the Rival by Kaylee Ryan

Kissing the Rival by Kaylee Ryan is now live!

Charlotte

I’m not just kissing the rival… I’m falling for him.

Spencer Pennington has always been a shameless flirt, but when it came to being the best in our MBA program, all bets were off, and the competition was on.

Fast-forward a few years, and all it takes is a bar at a failed wedding and my silly kiss-rating system to lock lips with the enemy. Cocky as ever, Spencer claims he’s a ten and kisses me to prove it. I kiss him back to scratch an old itch, not expecting to like it.

Which is a huge problem, because Mr. Tall, Dark, and Tattooed from grad school is my new boss. And I want to kiss him again and again. Even if I only gave him a four.

Spencer

Charlotte Krause could be the perfect girl, if she didn’t hate me so much. I’m unsure if it was just me or guys in general, but she had this stuck-up, all-work-no-play vibe about her in college.

Imagine my surprise when I find her at the resort bar rating kisses like it’s her job. This carefree woman is nothing like the focused girl who turned me down at freshman orientation. And every time after that.

When I promise her I’m a ten, I see that competitive spark light in her ocean-blue eyes. There she is. She might have kissed me to prove me wrong, but I know I’m right about one thing.

She feels the spark too. There’s just one problem. It turns out her actual job is working for me.

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Sunny Shelly’s Review: 3 Stars

Charlotte, aka Charlie, and Spencer first meet as college students, where he tries to flirt with her and she writes him off as being a jerk. He thinks she is stuck up. Flash-forward: The story then picks up ten years later, when her sister is marrying his best friend… At a bar before the wedding, Charlie is rating the kisses of other couples and Spencer challenges her to a kiss. It’s the best she’s ever had, but it is SPENCER, so Charlie says it’s so-so. Of course, Spencer wants better than that and makes it a personal challenge to up his rating.

In a twisted turn of events, after the wedding, Spencer turns out to be Charlie’s new boss. At first she’s wary, because she doesn’t like him. I honestly didn’t get *why* she hasn’t liked him all these years, because that initial interaction in college didn’t seem so bad. But Charlie has been holding on to that first impression for a decade. But Spencer has always kind of liked Charlie, so this story is a “he falls first” romance, which I always love reading. Charlie’s feelings for Spencer change on a dime, and I wish there was more buildup to that. I felt like I was told she changed her mind, wasn’t shown that she changed her mind, and that left me feeling lukewarm about Charlie in the end.

Kissing the Rival is part of a multi-author collaboration in The Kissing Games series, but each book is a standalone. The characters cross over between books as it is all part of the same universe.

Overall, this wasn’t the best Kaylee Ryan book I have read, but it was an enjoyable story.

I received an advanced copy and voluntarily left a review.

Meet Kaylee Ryan

New York Times and USA Today Bestselling author Kaylee Ryan has been crowned the Queen of Swoon by her readers. With nearly fifty romance books under her belt, she’s known for penning happily ever afters with heart. When she’s not writing, you can find her with a book in her hand or hanging out with her family where she resides in her home state of Ohio.

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