A Fake Marriage, a Dead Sister, and a Lot of Feelings

A Funeral, a Will, and a Terrible Idea

Here’s the setup. Rock star London Wallis is grieving her sister McKenna, who has just died and left behind a baby, Aidan, and a husband, Colt Manning, who happens to be London’s ex. Not just her ex. The guy she loved first, lost to her own sister, and has spent years pretending she’s fine about. Colt is drowning in single fatherhood and grief and, because this is a romance novel and not real life, the solution everyone lands on is that London and Colt should get married. Not for love. For Aidan. For practicality. For the kind of plot device that only works if you don’t think about it too hard.

So they do it. They get married, mostly as friends, mostly for the baby, and you already know where this is going because you’ve read a book before. What you don’t know yet is how much old hurt Katie Ashley is going to make you sit in before she lets these two have anything good. The love triangle isn’t backstory here, it’s active. London still has feelings for the man she married. The man she married still has feelings for the wife he’s mourning, tangled up with feelings for the woman he married to raise that wife’s kid. It’s a mess. It’s supposed to be a mess. That’s the appeal.

Where It Actually Gets Good, and Where It Really Doesn’t

What Ashley does well is grief that doesn’t behave. Colt isn’t a widower who’s sad in a tasteful, photogenic way. He’s a wreck who lashes out, who can’t look at his own son some days, who resents London for being alive when McKenna isn’t and hates himself for resenting her. That’s real. I’ve read a hundred marriage of convenience books where the grief is furniture, just something in the background to justify the plot, and this one actually makes you feel how ugly mourning gets. The scene where Colt breaks down over Aidan’s crib got me on that plane in a way I did not expect from a book with this cover.

Now the part I have to be honest about. Colt is possessive in ways that read differently depending on your mood and honestly your era. There’s a jealousy streak that tips into controlling, and London spends a lot of the book absorbing his moods instead of calling them out, which was written as devotion in 2013 and reads a little more uncomfortably now. I don’t think the book is malicious about it. I think it’s a product of when it was written, the same way a lot of early 2010s New Adult romance treated intensity as proof of love. But it’s there, and if you’re someone who flinches at a hero who gets scary-quiet when another man looks at his wife, you’ll flinch here too.

Also, and I say this with love: the pacing in the middle sags. There’s a stretch where London and Colt just orbit each other being sad and horny and not talking, and I found myself skimming toward whatever the actual conflict was going to be. Tangent, but this is the exact same problem I have with a lot of grief-heavy romance. The emotion is doing so much work that the plot forgets to move. Ashley pulls it back together for the back half, but the sag is real.

I want to like this book more cleanly than I do, and I keep asking myself if I’m just a sucker for the marriage-then-love-story structure regardless of execution. Possibly. I’ve never met a fake-married-turns-real premise I didn’t want to defend a little too hard.

Grief doesn’t ask permission before it turns into something else entirely, and this book understands that better than it understands consent-forward romance writing.

About Katie Ashley

Katie Ashley is a former teacher from Georgia who became one of the reliable names of the New Adult era, the wave of authors writing sexy, emotionally overheated books about people in their early twenties figuring out love and grief and rock bands, often all at once. She’s prolific in the way that authors from that boom had to be, churning out series after series when the genre was moving fast and readers wanted the next book yesterday. She writes with real feeling even when the plotting creaks, and “The Proposition” is a decent snapshot of what made that whole moment in romance publishing so addictive to readers who’d grown up on Nicholas Sparks and wanted something with more heat and less restraint.

If this wrecked you (or wrecked your patience), read these next

If you want more marriage of convenience with genuine emotional stakes, try Kristen Ashley’s “Motorcycle Man” for a messier, more chaotic version of the same hunger. If the grief angle is what got you, “It Ends with Us” by Colleen Hoover scratches something similar though it goes to darker places. And if you want the possessive-hero dynamic without the widower plot, Jamie McGuire’s “Beautiful Disaster” was doing the same brand of intense, slightly too much in the same era. You can find “The Proposition” and the rest of the series on Amazon if you want to start where I did.

For your book club

1. Is the marriage-of-convenience premise here actually earned by grief, or is it just a device to get London and Colt alone together?
2. Where does Colt’s jealousy cross from passionate into controlling for you, and did that line move as the book went on?
3. Does London get to be angry enough, given that she’s grieving her sister and living with her sister’s widower and baby?
4. How does the book’s 2013 New Adult DNA show up in ways a book written today might handle differently?
5. Would this story work at all if Aidan, the baby, weren’t in the picture forcing them together?