CW/TW: The hero’s client is a piece of work, who sexually harrasses his assistant, among many, many other women. This happens off the page, but we do see the fall out, and it isn’t handled as well as it could be. Proceed with caution.

The Way You Hold Me is a gentle, low-tension, second chance romance between publicist Skye Palmer and crisis manager Garrett Steele. They dated ten years ago, but then Garrett’s mother died, leaving him as sole ‘parent’ to his much younger sister, Max, and Skye ended the relationship because she felt that he would be better off without her and didn’t need the distraction. But Skye and Garrett find themselves thrown together when they find themselves representing the two halves of a celebrity couple in crisis.

The nature of the crisis is mostly that the male half of the couple is a raging arsehole who cheats on his wife, sexually harasses women, and is basically a waste of oxygen. Skye is representing Paige; Garrett is representing the arsehole (whose actual name is Julius).

The renewal of the romance between Skye and Garrett is quite pleasant but didn’t grab me. Skye is a massive overthinker of everything, and Garrett has abandonment issues, so there is a lot of one step forward, two steps back in their relationship. When it does work, which happens when they consciously remember to communicate with each other, it is very sweet. Sadly, however, they do both tend to fall back into bad habits, which may well be realistic, but also made the romance a bit too yo-yo-like for my taste.

I did, however, have one major concern about the story, which was completely unrelated to the central romance, and that was Garrett’s choice to take on Julius as a client. Garrett dislikes Julius from the start, and is pretty sure the allegations of sexual harassment are true, but chooses to take him on anyway because he wants to work on his own prejudices and biases.

I…feel that being prejudiced against someone for being a creepy bastard is actually an OK prejudice to have, but initially tried to withhold judgment because, you know, in Garrett’s job he does have to work with difficult people and that’s part of how it goes. The trouble is that, inevitably, Julius winds up sexually harassing Garrett’s assistant, Tara, when he comes to see Garrett at his office. And while Garrett does tell Tara that if Julius has made her uncomfortable in any way, he’ll sack Julius as a client, I found that I was still quite angry with Garrett, because I felt like he should have seen that coming. He’s Tara’s boss: he has a duty to provide a safe working environment for her, and by continuing to work with Julius even after the point when it was crystal clear that he was a harassing arsehole, he put her at risk.

I also felt a bit uncomfortable with the way this was handled. Tara doesn’t actually admit that Julius harassed her, just that he was a bit creepy, and when Garrett talks about sacking Julius, she kind of laughs and points out that he is a highly-paying client, the implication being that they can’t afford to sack him. Garrett doesn’t disagree with her assessment and does keep Julius as a client for the time being. So there are layers here – Tara seems to be trying to protect Garrett by downplaying the whole thing; Garrett, meanwhile, knows that there is more to it than that, but feels that he can’t act on it because Tara hasn’t said anything directly, so he gets more protective of Tara and while they both know why, otherwise nothing changes.

In fact, Garrett only sacks Julius after he is aggressive towards Skye in a meeting.

I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. I mean, on the one hand, this is behaviour that Garrett has witnessed, so he knows exactly what has happened and feels free to act on that. Which I get. But it didn’t sit well with me that when Garrett had reason to believe that his client had harmed an employee, someone to whom he had a duty of care, he didn’t act – and then when someone threatened Skye, he did. And yes, Skye is someone he is falling in love with, but she is also someone who has much more power in this situation than Tara did: she’s Garrett’s professional equal and works for another company. She isn’t dependent on Garrett’s or Julius’s goodwill for her salary.

It felt a bit to me like Tara just becomes an object in this situation – Julian harrasses her, Garrett protects her, but what does she get to do for herself? She seems to exist only to show what a good boss Garrett is…but, I don’t think he is, really. Yes, he cares about Tara and feels sincerely bad that she was harassed by his client, but I don’t think he ever really puts two and two together and realises that this is a situation he could and should have anticipated. Basically, I wouldn’t trust him not to take another dodgy client for the sake of his personal growth, and put Tara at risk again.

I don’t quite know how to grade this book. I mostly found it a perfectly pleasant read, with likeable protagonists and secondary characters, but it was also one of those books I kept putting down and forgetting to pick up again. Part of this is, I think, Wrong Reader syndrome. Sometimes, a book is perfectly fine, but it doesn’t quite work for you, and it isn’t the book’s fault. It’s a lack of chemistry between the book and the reader, perhaps. I feel like this book isn’t for me, but it might well be for someone else. (I do have a low tolerance for yo-yo relationships, so that might be part of the problem.)

But another part is that I don’t know how much weight to give that whole bit about Garrett taking Julius as a client and putting Tara at risk. Because for me, that really is a flaw in both Garrett and in the story.

I do think this is one of the most pitch-perfect illustrations I have seen of why it’s so harmful to accept bad behaviour in the name of tolerance and fairness: when you extend tolerance to someone who is acting in bad faith, then you make your space unsafe for others. And yet, having really shone a light on the pitfalls of this dynamic, the narrative just moves on, leaving it unaddressed – as if it never even noticed what it did there. And I don’t know what to make of that. I think I’m landing on a C minus here. C for an entertaining, well-written story that just wasn’t my cup of tea, with the minus being for that whole Julius debacle.