Startup Fiancé by Shilpa Mudiganti is a short contemporary romance that features an arranged marriage, corporate rivals, and an enemies-to-lovers storyline. It’s a quick read, but the length inhibited all of the emotional development I craved.

Arav Shetty and Nisha Jain are rivals; both are founders of successful app start-ups, Tech Notes and Note Nirvana, respectively. Reading about characters who developed note-taking apps made me realize how much my loves-planners-and-lists brain wants a good note-taking app. At one point Nisha thinks about adding more colorful features to her app and I was like “Yes! I want that!” and it’s not even a real app.

Anyway, Arav built his business from nothing, and it’s become his entire life:

My company was all I cared about. My business’s success represented everything I was–which was not my father. Not a drunkard who almost killed his wife with his addiction. Not a failed businessman. I was a success story and I built that success through nothing but countless hours of hard work.

I just couldn’t get Nisha Jain out of my mind.

That’s right. We’ve got a “I hate you, I can’t stand you, I can’t stop thinking about your hair, dammit” romance here.

Arav is frustrated (and scared) because Nisha’s company is cutting into his app’s success. So he asks her to meet him for coffee and offers to buy out Note Nirvana, and does so in a super crappy way. He gets even crappier when she refuses.

Nisha was born very wealthy, and so Arav assumes her company is nothing more than a hobby to her. She didn’t have to “work” for it like he did. What he doesn’t know is that Nisha didn’t have support for her venture, and so she did have to fight to build her company even if she did have family wealth to fall back on.

So while all this is happening, Arav’s uncle is working on arranging his marriage. Both Arav and Nisha are open and enthusiastic about the idea of an arranged marriage (in Nisha’s case it’s her grandmother doing to the matchmaking). This isn’t a situation where they would meet at the wedding, as Arav explains to his friend and CFO Ryan:

“How does this go, anyway? Are you going to go and interview her or something? Are you allowed to ask her if she is a virgin?”

Ryan’s mischievous smile was not lost on me. He had this weird idea that arranged marriage is an interview, where the groom gets to ask the bride a few questions, and depending on the answers, she gets the esteemed job of being his wife.

That was how marriages were arranged in the past. Neither the groom nor the bride had much say in the matter. Families met and the decision was made, with just a picture of the bride and groom to hold on to before the wedding. If they were lucky, the bride and groom were allowed to be in the same room when the elders of the family talked about their compatibility. But that was the way of the past. It didn’t work like that anymore.

Nowadays, not only did the bride and groom get to meet each other, but the parents only played the role of matchmaker. The actual decision rested with the couple, who usually met for a couple of dates without the family hovering around. But, no matter how many times I explained this to Ryan, he still stuck to his original theory.

For the record, Ryan is kind of a douche. He’s also the hero of the next books, which doesn’t thrill me.

Anyway, guess who Arav’s uncle and Nisha’s grandma decided to match up?

So after he’s a jerk and tells Nisha he’ll buy her company and is dismissive of her hard work, Arav finds out he’s supposed to go on a date with her. Oops.

Except Arav can’t stop thinking about Nisha, and he trusts his uncle’s judgement. Nisha is similarly invested in her grandmother helping her find a husband and respects her judgement regarding Arav:

“You would be surprised how much more exciting life is when you have a partner who is nothing like you and yet is everything you need.” She paused. “You are both independent and you both built your own companies successfully from the ground up. I felt you were both driven by the same fire. No harm in finding out if that’s true, right?”

So Nisha and Arav start to date, cautiously, because there are still trust issues at play. A relationship between the two of them would create complications for their respective companies, something neither one of them is willing to do. Plus Arav has some work to do making up for being a dickhead.

My struggle with this book was how quickly both  Arav and Nisha went from hissing and spitting at each other to being willing to date. They had a very emotionally charged encounter and they both value their companies pretty much above anything else. The idea that they’d suddenly be willing to go out with each other given all that baggage was a little bit too much development without sufficient support. I think had the book been longer, Arav and Nisha’s relationship could have been developed more slowly into something like a slow-burn romance. Instead they acted in ways that seemed to contradict their characters.

I thought the resolution to the external conflict was handled well, and I appreciated Arav’s eventual removal of his head from his ass. I definitely enjoyed this book; I just wanted more time for the characters to develop and grow toward each other.