King’s Crown by Marie JohnstonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Not Your Typical Age Gap Romance
I’d probably give this 4.5 ⭐️ if I could.
I was really pleasantly surprised by this book. I thought I was getting a run-of-the-mill age gap billionaire romance and what I actually got was a well thought out and sensitive romance.
Kendell is 28, divorced and living with her ex-husband to avoid having to move back home and end up having her entire life taken up with caring for her younger siblings. On the day she loses her job her husband tells her that his new college-aged girlfriend is moving in instead of letting her sign the new lease. So she is jobless and homeless when her ex-colleague tells her about a job his friend told him about that pays lots of money.
She goes on the interview that requires she take her potential employers company jet, that also has a wealthy business exec on board. They get halfway to their destination when a big snowstorm hits and they end up having to share the last hotel in Douglas, Montana for four days.
Gentry King is the CEO of King Oil. He is 49 years old and has four grown sons. He’s worked for his deceased wife’s family oil company since he was 19 and they had their first child. His mother in law has the company in a death grip and treats her family like pawns she can move around a board. Stuck in a hotel room with the gorgeous and more importantly, young, Kendell is a kind of torture because not only is she gorgeous but she’s funny, kind, bright and approachable. They spend four days playing board games and talking.
The reason I say this is a different kind of age-gap romance is that though there is a 20 year age difference, they are actually at similar stages in their lives. Kendell started raising her siblings from the age of 5 when she changed her first diaper. She takes her siblings to baseball games, to the library and pays for their school trips. She helps with homework and talks them through panic attacks. She may be 29 but she’s already lived a lifetime.
Kendell and Gentry can really talk to each other and they respect each other and the hold their respective families have on them. They fight their attraction, though not for long, not because of their ages, but because of what other people might think or do about it.
I love how real this relationship felt. Talking over the kitchen table about work and eating lunch together, holding hands on long walks and having sex in the back of a pickup truck. There was passion, but it wasn’t the glue that held the relationship together, that was their respect for each other and the fact they genuinely liked each other.
I also liked that though Gentry was ridiculously wealthy he didn’t hold the purse strings on the family coffers. He also only helped Kendell out a little bit and she wanted to find work more than anything, whether that was with him or anywhere else, preferably one that used her brain.
There was a lot to this book, from the way the family members interacted, to the business that Gentry and his sons were involved in. I loved how the two families were equally important and the way they wove together was interesting to say the least.
This was a really good book and had a nice HEA, but also left me really wanting to know about the rest of the King family and how their immediate future was going to look. I will definitely be reading the next book.
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