I’ve tried to get away from insta-reads from my favorite authors in recent years because inevitably, they’re going to hit a low note and it’s so disappointing when it happens. Tessa Bailey has been on my ‘tentative’ list for a couple years now because with her rapid publishing schedule, sometimes there’s a sameness to her stories. She’s a guaranteed laugh, a guaranteed dirty talker, and a guaranteed excellent character developer. But she’s not guaranteed when it comes to plots.

Here’s the gist of The Au Pair Affair. An aging hockey player and divorced dad of a twelve-year-old daughter hires an au pair he’s wildly attracted to; the au pair is a grad student working through past trauma and fighting her attraction to the hot dad. There are a handful of overlapping tropes from which to choose, but ultimately, it’s a contemporary hockey romance. It’s also the second book in Bailey’s Big Shots series.

Burgess Abraham is a professional hockey player known as Sir Savage. He’s the enforcer on the ice, the protector when he’s off, and the subject of too many of Tallulah Aydin’s unwanted dreams. The two met in book one, at the wedding of Wells Whitaker and Josephine Doyle, and Burgess was taken with Tallulah right away, but she was Antarctica-bound for a research stint in her field of marine biology. Burgess is, by all accounts, a good guy. He has an amicable relationship with his wife, his daughter likes him, and he’s a hard worker.

Tallulah is moving to Boston for grad school and needs somewhere to live, so working as Lissa Abraham’s live-in au pair is the perfect solution. Tallulah is skittish around men, but since Wells and Josephine vouched for Burgess, she’s giving it a go. Imagine her surprise when she learns that Burgess’ on-ice persona is Sir Savage, a bruiser lauded for his fisticuff skills. She’s no hockey aficionado, so his physicality is alarming.

Built in from the characterisations is a natural conflict between a nerdy, pacifist scientist and a physical professional athlete. He’s thirty-seven and she’s twenty-six, and while there is an age difference, it didn’t strike me as much of one – they’re both millennials, after all. Tallulah has a traumatic event in her past that has guided the way she navigates the world, particularly when it comes to men and dating, and on the surface, Burgess sets off all her alarms. Normally she wouldn’t bother to delve any deeper, but again, this is her job and her friends vouched for him. So she’s trying. It’s the uneven execution of psychology and events that gave me pause.

Bailey’s sex scenes are widely commented upon, particularly the smutty talk from our heroes, but here, it isn’t so sexy because, considering Tallulah’s trauma, Burgess comes off as tone deaf. Tallulah has a traumatic past that seems to disappear upon that first sex scene. Burgess isn’t overly aggressive or persuasive, and Tallulah isn’t overly submissive or wishy washy. It’s just out of left field and weirdly intense.

Tallulah explains through the whole story that, in order to move beyond her traumatic past, she’s trying to get out of her comfort zone and try new things, like skydiving and skinny dipping. Yet, when Burgess doesn’t want to push his own boundaries, she belittles him and displays no understanding of his reasoning. It feels uneven. Like, he vocally and repeatedly supports and praises her when she accomplishes her goal, but she punishes him when he stays in his safe zone.

The Au Pair Affair starts out so fun and flirty, and Bailey had me enthralled until almost the three-quarters mark… but then it goes rapidly downhill with the Crisis Moment. Even as a teenager navigating the dating pool, I was never a breakup and get back together kind of girl; if an argument was bad enough to break up, then I was done. Tallulah and Burgess hit this point where it’s obvious that a fork in the road is necessary to kick in the final act of the story, but the conflict is just so childish and hard to read. Introspection, like the harpsichord in classical music, is best in small doses. Never have two characters suffered and wallowed in their own misery as these two. They both – Tallulah more so – needed a swift Moonstruck Cher slap upside the head. Ohmygod.

When she’s on, Bailey is unbeatable… I’m looking at you, Getaway Girl and Follow. Those books were fresh and new, and totally different when they were published. Sad to say, The Au Pair Affair falls into the penalty box, although I’m sure Bailey’s creative mind will put out a new story that’ll blow my socks off any day now.