Contingency Plan by Marie James

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As a former FBI agent, Flynn Coleman was made for his work with Blackbridge Security.

He’s highly trained, has a skill set meant for analysis and investigation, and meant to do important things.

Yet, he’s chasing a twenty-year-old starlet’s daughter around New York City because the spoiled brat never learned how to behave.

Remington Blair doesn’t need a babysitter, but her parents insist.

Keeping Flynn Coleman on his toes will be the most fun she’s had in a while.

Besides, just hearing him call her name with that accent is enough to keep her running.

Contingency Plan

Babysitting Duty Was Never Supposed to Feel Like This

The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 💙💛💚❤️
Spice: 🌶️🌶️🌶️
Chemistry: 🧪🧪🧪🧪
Story/Plot: 📕📗📘📙📔
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌏
Character development: 😋🙂😁😛
Narrator(s): 🎙🎙🎙🎙🎙
Narration type: Dual Narration

Character Backgrounds and Plot Summary

I went into this one expecting a fairly standard bodyguard romance and came out with way more feelings than I planned for. Flynn Coleman is a former FBI agent who joined Blackbridge Security expecting real work, analysis, investigations, the kind of thing his training actually prepared him for. Instead, he gets handed babysitting duty for Remington Blair, the twenty-year-old daughter of a famous, mostly absent mother and a stepfather who cares more about keeping up appearances than actually parenting his stepdaughter.

Remington has spent her whole life being ignored at home and putting on a show for everyone else, so naturally she takes it out on her security detail, and Flynn is the latest guy she decides to torment. She walks around half dressed just to fluster him, pushes every boundary she can find, and genuinely seems delighted every time she gets a reaction out of him. What starts as pure chaos slowly turns into something real, and I loved watching Flynn go from exasperated professional to a man who clearly cannot stop thinking about this girl even when he knows better. Things eventually blow up enough that Flynn gets pulled off the assignment and sent back to St. Louis after crossing a line he wasn’t supposed to cross, and that separation hit harder than I expected for a book this steamy.

Highlights and Limitations

The chemistry is really the whole show here. Remington is not subtle about what she wants, and I actually appreciated that Marie James didn’t make her some passive damsel waiting around. She’s clearly starved for real attention, not just romantic attention but someone who actually sees her instead of the polished image her parents want her to project, and that emotional hunger comes through in almost every scene she’s in, even the funny ones where she’s just trying to get a rise out of Flynn.

My favorite moments were the small ones, him catching himself using a softer voice with her, her pushing just a little further because she knows exactly what she’s doing.

Where the book lost me a little was pacing. The New York City setting and the security detail premise set up so much potential for real external stakes, and I kept waiting for the suspense element to ramp up the way it does in other books in this series, but it stays fairly light on that front until closer to the end. I also wished we’d gotten a bit more of Remington’s relationship with her mother explored on the page rather than mostly implied, because that dynamic is doing a lot of heavy lifting for her character motivation and I wanted to sit in it longer.

Narration

Jacob Morgan and Callie Dalton are a great pairing for this one. Morgan gives Flynn this steady, controlled voice that cracks open in exactly the right moments, especially once Remington starts getting under his skin, and you can hear him fighting to stay professional even as his tone softens around her.

Callie Dalton captures Remington’s mix of bravado and vulnerability really well. She never plays her as just bratty or just sad, there’s always both underneath, and that balance is what sold me on Remington as a character instead of just a plot device.

The scenes where they’re bickering have a genuinely fun back and forth energy, and both narrators clearly know how to build tension without overplaying it. I will say the accent Flynn is supposed to have, the one the blurb makes such a big deal about, felt a little inconsistent to me, sometimes it was there and sometimes I barely noticed it, but it never took me out of the story.

Final Opinion

Overall, I really enjoyed this one, even with my pacing complaints. Remington and Flynn’s dynamic won me over faster than I expected, and by the time Flynn gets sent away I was fully invested in whether these two would find their way back to each other.

If you’ve been working through the Blackbridge Security series already, this is a solid entry, and if you’re newer to it, I think it works fine as a starting point since the found family security team backdrop is easy to pick up. I’d recommend it to anyone who wants a bodyguard romance with real emotional stakes underneath the banter, just go in knowing the suspense plot takes a back seat to the relationship for most of the book.

I closed this one wishing there was a little more time spent on Remington’s family fallout, but I still walked away satisfied and ready to pick up the next book in the series.

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