HATE TO WANT YOU is book 1 in the Forbidden Hearts series by Alisha Rai. This book is amazing, y'all. I got an ARC at the Romantic Times convention this year and it was burning a hole in in my pocket for a while before I could clear my plate and get to reading it. I kept hearing Good Book Noises from other people on social media about HATE TO WANT YOU before I started my copy, and I was a little worried that it might not hold up to the hype, but it totally does.

Livvy Kane and Nicholas Chandler were fast childhood friends who became teenage lovers. Their families co-owned a business and all the members of each family were really close until tragedy struck. Livvy and Chandler broke up, and the families completely stopped interacting. Now Livvy and Chandler have only seen each other for one night a year for the last ten years. Every year for Livvy's birthday she would text Nicholas, and they would get together and have a single night of hawt hate sex. No contact the rest of the year. Until finally Livvy decides she can't keep self-destructing any more, and she doesn't call Nicholas when her 30th birthday rolls around.

Livvy is now back in town because her mother broke her hip, and Livvy comes back to help take care of her and repair some broken family relationships. Livvy has been nearly defeated by all the tribulations life has thrown at her and her family, but I love her resiliency and her determination to move forward and improve her circumstances. Nicholas is the rich golden boy who is deliciously broody, with plenty of family problems of his own. The tension between these two is omg, SO quaveringly GOOD! I love me good angsty romance, and Alisha Rai delivers it in spades. Rai's characters are layered and complex. I love the nuanced and sympathetic treatment of Livvy's mental illness- the positive messages of self care and healing that are deftly spread throughout the story. This is Rai's most emotionally developed book to date, and it's fantastic.

And, being a Rai book, the sex is gloriously raunchy and utterly hot. Bree (one half of the writing team that makes up Kit Rocha) blurbed this on Twitter as "like if Romeo & Juliet had emotional maturity and a happy ending." I love the developed characters entwined with all the feels and all the swoon-inducing bedroom moves. Rai's HATE TO WANT YOU is an angsty winner that leaves me quivering eagerly for the next in the series.