seriously romantic: bad judgment by meghan march

oh, my old fave, enemies-to-lovers trope. i think it's my fave because all that animosity is so combustible. bad judgment is a new adult standalone that follows justine and ryker, and their tempestuous relationship during their third year of law school.

like so many enemies-to-lovers justine and ryker come from opposite sides of the track. ryker was born with a silver spoon, the son of a state supreme court justice and high profile attorney who comes from money. justine is the daughter of two con artists who destroyed her credit by stealing her identity while she was still in diapers. her grandfather raised her, and what little income she has from his estate was depleted by the time it came to pay for law school.

when the school decides to cut their merit scholarship program, justine is desperate. and when ryker's father offers to pay her tuition in exchange for her help in getting ryker to refocus on his studies, she has no choice but accept his offer. the relationship that grows between justine and ryker as they spend time together is full of sexy chemistry but also they are perfectly matched. for all their differences they both are really smart. ryker may be unsure of his future in law, but justine knows exactly how she wants to make a difference.

of course both justine and ryker are keeping some secrets from each other, and like secrets tend to do in romance novels, things blow up in time for the third act. luckily, nothing keeps them apart for too long, though some of the twists involving the secrets ryker was keeping were both telegraphed and didn't exactly work for me.

at one point when they are on the outs, ryker gets into a car accident, the events that happen before sort of make sense, but then what happens afterwards made me wonder at certain points whether or not he had been drugged or if something more sinister was happening. and then the fallout from that didn't seem severe enough. it's not like i wanted ryker to be caught with a dui and ruining his life, but why even start down that road? was it supposed to help justine understand some of ryker's other choices? if it was, it didn't do that all that well.

but since things do get resolved and a sweet epilogue ties things up nicely, and i just loved ryker the end result is that i have mostly good feelings about this story.