Until four years ago, Charlotte "Charlie" Finch was a police officer, but after being betrayed by her NYPD colleagues, she now works the poker tables in a bar. She still has a score to settle with Dmitri Romanov, the New York Russian mafia boss, who had a hand in her fall from grace. So when Aiden O'Malley enters the bar to make her an offer, she reluctantly listens. Aiden, head of the infamous O'Malleys from the Boston underworld, and Charlie had met a year before and sparks flew briefly; Charlie didn't give Aiden a second thought, but Aiden might have found a way for them both to get their revenge on Romanov: Charlie will have to convince everyone that she is Aiden's fiancée.

I had expected the follow-up to FORBIDDEN PROMISES to be about Keira and Dmitri, alas it was not to be. However, Aiden had seemed a pretty fascinating character, and I'm not quite sure what happened, but I never became invested in UNDERCOVER ATTRACTION. There were no major problems per se, but there were many improbable little things that in the end added up, and the result was not particularly satisfactory, for this reader anyway. The other books in The O'Malleys have great characters are very fast-paced, with terrific action sequences, and the romantic interests share incendiary chemistry, all of which were notably absent here. At the beginning of their fake relationship, Charlie has no qualms about them having sex, she acknowledges the attraction, and yet for a good while it was mostly Aiden who did the work, orally or manually; I wondered if it was the author's way of telling us that Aiden was a caring man; still, it felt odd. Although told in the third person, there was quite a bit of internal dialogue, but very little was actually going on. I have read every book in this series, and I must say that the villains, who seemed to have appeared previously, did not ring a bell. I don't really know why they were brought in, as they were a tad too over the top to be believable.

On the other hand, the cop/criminal angle within the romance was expertly handled, as were the tenuous family relationships. Liam O'Malley played a tiny role, and I wished we had seen a bit more of him, because he seemed to liven things up, for reasons that entirely escape me. I felt the romance was rather lackluster, apart from a few moments, but Keira and Dmitri were their usual entertaining selves, so yet again, I am waiting for Dmitri.