This month’s Change of Plans TBR Challenge prompt led me to Allison Temple’s Honeymoon Sweet, a cute fake relationship contemporary romance in which two guys, both abandoned by their partners while on a week-long Caribbean cruise, end up spending the time together and falling in love. This makes for something of a whirlwind romance, it’s true, but it works, and the author adds depth to the story by skilfully interweaving moments of melancholy and self-reflection with humour and tenderness.

Doug Freeman did not expect to be going on his honeymoon on his own – but his fiancé dumped him via text fourteen minutes after he was supposed to have been walking down the aisle. There’d been no explanation or attempt at a proper apology. Just “Never mind – I’m sorry”. So now here Doug is, forty-eight hours later – having been persuaded by his mother and sisters to go on the cruise and treat it as a kind of reset – heading along the corridor from his suite, when he encounters a naked man. Doug can’t help but notice the guy is hot – he might be in a bit of a funk, but he’s not blind – before admonishing himself and asking the man if there’s anything he can do to help.

Tripp Gillingham persuaded his workaholic boyfriend, Liam, to take a week-long cruise so they could spend some quality time together, but a delayed flight, missing luggage and then a flaming row because Liam had already broken his promise about not working on holiday somehow finds Tripp standing on the wrong side of their cabin door in his birthday suit. He’s wondering how he’s going to get back inside when the guy who just walked past him stops, retraces his steps and offers to help. Tripp gratefully follows “Doug, Douglas, Dougie” as he’d called himself, to his suite, in which, Tripp realises, everything is laid out for a couple. Doug, who seems oddly downcast for someone clearly on his honeymoon, lends him one of the two bathrobes hanging in the closet, and Tripp goes on his way.

It’s not until the next day – after he and Liam have had yet another row, this time while standing in the corridor outside Doug’s room – that Tripp finds out why there’s no second Mr. Doug on the ship. He’s appalled and furious that someone could behave so badly towards such a nice guy and offers Doug a shoulder to cry on (literally) – which is, Doug admits, the first time in quite a while anyone has shown him such kindness. Tripp then heads off in search of Liam, knowing where he’s going to find him (the business suite) and what he needs to do (break up with him); being honest, he’s known for a while that their relationship was only about good sex and shared rent – he’s just been fooling himself it could ever be anything else.

Later that day, Tripp catches up with Doug again and over lunch suggests that they spend the rest of the cruise together, doing whatever activities Doug has planned – and that they could pretend to be married for the rest of the week. Not married married (not that Tripp wouldn’t mind getting up close and personal with Doug) more like travel-buddies who share meals and hang out. Doug needs cheering up and Tripp is just the man for the job – besides, he likes Doug and wants to make him feel better.

What follows is a cute, mostly light-hearted romance between two guys who, although they meet at the worst possible time, are nonetheless perfectly suited to each other. The writing is deft and displays a real lightness of touch as the author reveals what makes these two men tick and develops their emotional connection.

Tripp is, well, a trip! He’s charming, funny and delightful, he never takes himself too seriously and he is thoroughly invested in making sure Doug has a good time. His obvious fondness for Doug and the ridiculous pet names he comes up with are stupidly adorable, and the story is full of playful, silly banter and real affection. Tripp is definitely a life-and-soul-of-the-party kinda guy, but beneath that is someone who worries about ever being enough, someone who is is so desperate to fall in love that he thinks every boyfriend is The One until real life catches up and things crash and burn. He does worry, of course, that he’s repeating his pattern with Doug, and still struggles to trust himself and to trust that he’s enough, but deep down, he knows that this time it really is different and that he’s never felt like this about a guy before.

At the beginning of the story Doug is understandably subdued, and I appreciated that his sorrow is neither magically waved away or allowed to overwhelm the story. Even though the romance takes place over a very short space of time, the author allows time for both characters to do a bit of soul searching, and for Doug to look back over his relationship with Calvin, to see the cracks developing in a way he hadn’t noticed and to realise that maybe it wasn’t what he thought it was. He can see now that he had allowed himself to be carried along by life instead of actively taking part and making his own decisions for the past few years – but knowing that and breaking the pattern are not the same thing, which leads to a bit of frustration towards the end of the book when he seems to be retreating back into old habits.

I’m not generally a fan of insta-love, but even though Doug and Tripp fall in love incredibly quickly, Honeymoon Sweet mostly worked for me. The premise, as with a lot of fake relationship stories, has to be taken with a pinch of salt and a roll of the eyes, and I did want to give Doug a kick up the arse a couple of times, but the strong characterisation, their ‘rightness’ as a couple, and Tripp’s irrepressible joy and humour helped me to see past the negatives. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a low-angst love story with depth, humour and heart.