After being disappointed by the first book in this series, I gave the second one a chance anyway - mainly because it was a fast, simple read, and my insomnia means that reading anything too complicated at night is a no-no. I figured this would be mildly entertaining and perhaps something would happen in this sequel, now that the setup from the first book had been completed.
I finally managed to finish this, but I won't be continuing the series. After all the frustrating things about the first book - Haley's lack of curiosity about basically everything in her life, the vague storyline about her father and the Zenith client that was having him followed, and the constant introductions of more and more guys that all seem basically the same - the second book follows the same pattern. Essentially nothing at all happens. Haley continues to not investigate anything about her father, Zenith, the client, or these guys, and instead just drifts through her days, letting them buy her things and boss her around and just happily going along with it because they're all hot. There are some meals, a party, some random activities, and a gala, along with some bland flirting - and literally nothing else happens.
What's so frustrating about this to me is that there are FIVE books in this series - what could possibly take up so much space? Haley is not particularly interesting, and her main characteristic is that she's self-absorbed. She's handed a job at a company with a client that's involved with harming her father, and lives with the guys on the client's team, but there's no effort to investigate. Why doesn't she ask the guys about her father every single day? Why doesn't she use the resources at her fingertips to snoop around client files, find more information on what these guys were hired to do, or understand how her father is linked to this other man? Why doesn't she actually go to San Francisco to find this stupid safebox and find out what might have happened to her father?
She doesn't do any of those things because there are six versions of the same boring guy, controlling her life. Apparently they're all intelligent, athletic, wealthy, stylish, ridiculously attractive, have a vague variety of interests, work at Zenith, and are obsessively attracted to Haley. There are a few minor differences between them (one of them has glasses! one of them has a British accent!), but they're essentially interchangeable, and it's hard to tell them apart. And because Haley likes all of them, she just shuffles between them, having identical interactions - lots of hugs, sleeping in the same bed, kisses on the cheek, bland compliments. Apparently this boring harem is more important than solving a lifetime's worth of mysteries or tracking down her father, the person that's kept her safe at great personal cost for the last decade.
At one point near the end, she finally loses her patience and vents some frustration, telling a few of the guys that she doesn't like not having input in her life. It was so exciting - perhaps now she'll take off, find her father, figure out what's going on? Maybe she'll pack up her things, call the one guy she's interested in (doesn't matter who, they're all the same), hit the road? Nope - by the next morning she's in the car with some of the guys, heading off to lunch, and apparently it doesn't matter. She even mentions feeling guilty about saying something, after they drugged her, kidnapped her, and are now financing her every whim. At the gala she finally shows a little backbone by following a few of the guys and demanding to be kept in the loop, but it's way too little, too late.