Nothing Short of Perfect (Harlequin Desire) - Day Leclaire Wow, what an utterly DIRE situation.

Geekaholic genius hero, Justice St. John, who doesn't feel emotions and speaks like a computer? Yeah, I could get behind that. I was looking forward to his story, actually, and yes, I did enjoy reading from his POV and internal narrative.

Until I "met" his heroine, Daisy Marcellus. Whom I couldn't stand. Whom I kind of sort of hated. Whom I found to be a manipulative, lying, histrionic, headstrong, illogical mess. Her narrative pained me, and I found myself skim reading large sections, including the sex scenes. I'm normally an OCD reader who cannot skip any words in a book. So, yes, holy shite, it was that dire.

I was considering going with 2 stars because I actually liked the secondary characters, including Jett, Daisy's teenage foster kid whom Daisy adopted after her parents couldn't foster Jett any longer, and Pretorius, Justice's uncle with the social anxiety disorder. But no...when you cannot stand to read from the heroine's POV (a POV that occurs in a romance novel the majority of the time), then a book really cannot pull itself above that one star.

Oh, and to top it all off, there's also that minor detail that they were foster siblings in the same household. What the figgity fug?????? Can we say SQUICKY??? Gross gross gross. *shudders*

Not to mention the lie that Daisy told at the time that changed Justice's life. She was 15, going on 16, when a 17-year-old Justice entered her parents' household as her new foster brother. She lied to him and told him she was 17, too. They capped off that summer with her losing her virginity to him. Her parents find out, toss him out of the foster home, he gets a replacement home where they know what he's done (namely, statutory rape) and treat him like crap for it, and he also loses his scholarship to Harvard because he no longer was of "good character." Okay, so maybe that sort of thing is kinda realistic in today's day and age (I'm not sure if it is or not?), but in terms of characterization, it just showed me that she'd always been impulsive, stubborn, and selfish with no thought to the consequences. Jesus H. Christ.