Merit

Maverick Houston is the Treasure State Wildcats football star and the campus playboy, and everyone adores him except the narrator. She has loathed him since they were ten. Their parents are best friends who live on the same block, so vacations, parties and holidays have kept throwing them together for a decade of trading insults.

Then Maverick's mother announces at a family dinner that she is dying. She asks the two of them to drop the past and start over. They go out on a date, and soon they are fake dating, a plan that comes with a proposition of the narrator's own.

The book is a contemporary romance in an enemies-to-lovers and fake relationship mold, told in first person by the woman who never wanted him. Maverick is arrogant, blunt and far too good-looking, and the one thing in his favor is how much he loves his mom. The two also share a small piece of history: she kissed him once when she was three.

The tone is humorous and combative, with a college football setting and a family illness underneath. The pretend relationship does not stay pretend, and the narrator is left resenting that she has fallen for the boy she swore she would always hate.