A Not So Meet Cute

A Not So Meet Cute is Meghan Quinn’s 2022 contemporary romance, the first book in her Cane Brothers series and one of the entries that helped widen her readership beyond the long running fans of her earlier work. The premise plays on the meet cute trope that contemporary romance readers know well and inverts it. Caroline Buchanan has just been dumped, fired, and humiliated in a single bad afternoon. Looking for any kind of escape, she walks into the office of Huxley Cane, the wealthy CEO of the Cane Enterprises empire, and proposes a solution to both their problems. He needs to look settled and married for an upcoming family situation. She needs financial stability after her life has fallen apart. They will be married in name only, sleep in separate rooms, and split when his crisis is resolved.

Meghan Quinn has been writing contemporary romance for years, and the marriage of convenience trope is one she handles with practiced confidence. The slow inversion from contractual arrangement to actual feelings is the entire pleasure of the book, and Quinn knows when to lean into the obvious beats and when to subvert them. Caroline is more complicated than the meet cute setup suggests, with reasons of her own for the situation she has put herself in. Huxley is a wealthy CEO type but Quinn lets him be more vulnerable than the alpha businessman trope usually allows, and the slow reveal of his actual interior life gives the romance its weight.

The Cane Brothers series continues with The Mister Effect and The Lineup, each focused on a different Cane brother and his complicated path to the right woman. Quinn’s small town and big family settings give her the kind of recurring cast that her readers love returning to.

For readers who enjoy Christina Lauren, Tessa Bailey, Lauren Layne, or Helena Hunting, Meghan Quinn is squarely in the same neighborhood. A Not So Meet Cute is a comfortable, well crafted entry into the Cane Brothers world and a fair sample of what she does best.