tl;dr: chemist accidentally drugs her childhood nemesis with a love potion, sexy hijinks ensue
The Story:
Nothing makes me happier than a completely ridiculous but fun storyline in a romance novel, and this book delivers. The book opens on Sylvie Fontaine, a chemist for a pharmaceutical company, who believes she may have developed the world’s first love-inducing drug (not just lust, it also creates emotional bonds). She’s testing on rats, but she thinks it is ready for human testing, and has created some love potion-laced jelly beans with her enzymes, hoping to lure her employer in because she’s tired of slacker jerks. Luc LeDeux, her childhood mortal enemy and now a roguish lawyer, waltzes into her lab and demands that she test some water samples that he believes implicate a giant oil company of toxic dumping. Her enzyme-filled jelly beans are sitting right there on the table, and wouldn’t you know who has a sweet tooth when her back is turned?
This sets up the rest of the novel, where Sylvie and Luc attempt to fight off their growing attraction to each other, which only grows stronger as they get to know each other better, beyond the misconceptions they’ve had of each other. The reason that they disliked each other so much makes sense–Sylvie thought that he an obnoxious and arrogant womanizer, and Luc thought that Sylvie looked down on him for being poor and dirty as a kid. Over time, they both realize that they were wrong; eventually, they give in to the desire between them.