Princess Brat by Brianna Hale

 Brianna Hale can be a hit or miss author for me but when she is on her game, she is ON her game, and nobody writes Daddy kink like her. Because of that, she's still one of my favorite authors to this day and I recently bought myself some of her backlist roamnces with Carina Press as a treat to myself.

PRINCESS BRAT is a bodyguard romance. Adrienne is the twenty-year-old daughter of a tabloid reporter whose bad reporting has just led to someone's death. Now she's the target of people who want revenge, so her father has hired Dieter, a thirty-two-year-old ex-SAS bodyguard, to protect her. Adrienne is an artist who dresses like a goth/punk lolita, and she has a wicked temper, but 80% of it is all for show. Dieter sees right through it, but confronting the source of Adrienne's brattiness might bring them closer than professionalism would allow.

This was so good. I'm surprised it has such low ratings. I'm guessing it's because of the heroine's flaws. I liked her a lot, though. She's difficult and spoiled, but she made me laugh out loud several times. I actually really related to the heroine a lot because I'm also super immature for my age, and I can be a brat, too. It makes me sad when people demand perfection from their heroines because, for me, a huge appeal of romances is that it gives happily-ever-afters to flawed human beings. Seeing two perfect people hit it off isn't really satisfying on that same level, because it makes the happiness feel that much more unattainable.

Dieter was also pretty dreamy. Some of Hale's heroes come off as smarmy, but Dieter was the perfect blend of alpha and caring. He reminded me a lot of Frederic from SOFT LIMITS. I loved that he indulged Adrienne without letting her get away with any of her toxic behavior. The ending was perfect.

4.5 out of 5 stars