Reviewed by Larissa

TITLE: Date Me

SERIES: Tattoos and Temptation Prequel

AUTHOR: Mia Monroe

PUBLISHER: Self-published

LENGTH: Novella

RELEASE DATE:  June 20, 2021

BLURB: 

He’s the hottest man I’ve ever seen. 

I’m shy, not hot, and eating entirely too many pastries every day just to see my crush. It’s ridiculous to pine for a guy so far out of my league, but here we are.

When I confide in my friend about my crush, he pumps me up, giving me the courage to find out if this is a passing infatuation or the beginning of something more.

All I have to do is ask Wyatt to Date Me.

Date Me is a prequel novella to the Tattoos and Temptation series. In it, you’ll get a sneak peek of future main characters, tons of pining, a sweet tattooed hunk, and enough steam to satisfy. Welcome to Miami.

REVIEW: 

Mia Monroe’s Date Me, a prequel novella to her fantastic Tattoos & Temptation series, follows Twist Me, the last book in the series.  That sequencing is both ironic and apropos.  Having the first follow the last may seem backward.  However, here it makes perfect sense.  Date Me forms one bookend to the series, showing us the T&T men before it all began. Twist Me forms the other, showing all of our T&T men with their HEAs.  It’s like wrapping these seven stories up into a tidy, gift-wrapped package.

In Date Me, we meet Wyatt and Josh.  Wyatt works at Dulce Santo, the bakery that along with Black Heart Tattoos form the anchor points for the T&T series.  Josh works nearby and comes in every day Wyatt is working to buy pastries.  It’s, of course, an excuse to see Wyatt and to work up the nerve to ask Wyatt to date him.  The two men dance around each other for months, each obviously attracted to the other but too shy and nervous to act on it.  With some gentle support and encouragement from friends, they finally get together.  By “friends”, I’m referring to Josh’s coworker and, of course, many of the Dulce Santo men who we see fall in love across the series.

The T&T series consists of interconnected, sequential stories. While they work as standalones, they are that much better if you read them in order.  Date Me follows that rule, although it’s even more of a standalone than the rest.  Date Me provides its own self-contained, adorably sweet, instalove romance.  In the rest of the series, the characters weave themselves in and out of the different stories.  In contrast, Wyatt and Josh do not appear anywhere else in the T&T series.  It’s one of the reasons why publishing this first story after completing the series works.

Even in so few pages (exact page length is not provided but the book takes less than an hour to read), Ms. Monroe manages to include all of the things we’ve come to expect and love about her writing.  A lovely romance, an endearing couple, hot, steamy scenes, humor, and a diverse spectrum of men with distinct personalities who aren’t all hard bodies and model perfect.  She also lays the groundwork for the first book in the series, Marry Me, which features Briar and Jude in what is probably my favorite installment in T&T.

If you’ve read T&T, Date Me is a must-read.  If you haven’t, read this anyway even as just a standalone.  Its sweet story will give you a quick burst of happiness, and I’d be shocked if it doesn’t coax you into continuing with the rest of the T&T series. Enjoy!

RATING:

BUY LINK: 

Amazon