Hexed by Emily McIntire

Title: Hexed (Never After #6)

Author: Emily McIntire

Publisher: Bloom 2024

Genre: Contemporary Romance

Pages: 544

Rating: 4/5 stars

Reading Challenges: Fairytale Stories - The Little Mermaid; Romanceopoly - Dark Psychology: Dissonance Hall (Morally Gray Love Interest)

Where I Got It: Library

Spice Rating: 5

Venesa Andersen has never been good. She wasn’t good enough for her parents, and she isn’t good enough for the gangster uncle who took her in after they died. But she’s cunning. Beautiful. Dutiful to her uncle’s demands. And she doesn’t have time for a moral compass, anyway. When her runaway cousin returns to their coastal southern town, she brings a man with her…and Venesa soon realizes he’s the only one who’s ever seen her for her.

There’s just one problem: she can never have him.

Enzo “Loverboy” Marino is a wealthy businessman by day and prince of the underworld by night. Underboss to a notorious mafia syndicate, he answers to no one except his father, the strongest don in the Northeast. When he’s tasked with marriage, Enzo doesn’t think twice.

Until he meets his fiancée’s cousin.

Venesa is everything he never knew he wanted, bewitching him with her sultry voice and supple curves. But Enzo learned long ago that for a man like him, life is better without the things you want.

When plans unravel and temptation sings its siren song, they’ll both have to choose what’s more important: duty to their families, or a forbidden love that was never supposed to be.

Another dark contemporary take on a classic fairy tale. This time we get to see how the FMC is a villain right alongside the MMC, but are they really villains? Sure they do bad things, but some of the characters are much much worse people. We get a very complicated situation with two crime families playing games with each other and the main characters. I really fell for Venesa immediately. Of course she was put into an impossible situation as a young child and then forced to seek approval and family. It took a little longer to warm up to Enzo but I eventually came to understand him also. I loved the relationship been Enzo and Venesa. I did wish that their relationship progressed more quickly than it did. Overall, I did enjoy this one and will be reading more in the series.

Never After

• #1 Hooked
• #2 Scarred
• #3 Wretched
• #4 Twisted
• #5 Crossed
• #6 Hexed

Next up on the TBR pile: