One scene that always struck me as a little weird for a romance book was the first Vegas rooftop.
"Not everything is about you, Hollander." He didn't look at Shane at all when he said it. His voice hadn't been angry. He just sounded...tired. And sad.
Shane studied his profile. His own anger left him, and he found himself caring about Ilya Rozanov, which was an odd sensation.
Characters misreading each other is a very common romance trope, like in Pride and Prejudice. Usually that's something that is eventually resolved as the characters come to know each other better, but Reid cannot stand for Ilya to be thought badly of by the audience even for a scene--even when the characters barely know each other at all. Instead, Shane has to have a perfect perception of Ilya's mental state (even though that directly contradicts her description of Shane's qualities) and immediately puts his own feelings aside to center Ilya's. See, Ilya isn't being a jerk, reader, Shane is concerned about him so you should be too!
It happens in the Sochi scene as well.
Rozanov was being an asshole, which was nothing new, but he didn’t seem to mean it. In fact, Shane would bet that Rozanov would actually really like him to stay. He looked like he could use a hug.
Shane and Ilya literally never spend any time together outside of a quick hookup a few times a year, but here he's able to perfectly read Ilya through his attempts at masking to read a complicated hidden desire. And this is a particularly annoying thing to me when she made that stupid list and said that Shane isn't observant or perceptive. Because it means that Shane's not reading Ilya because Shane is good at reading people, but because Reid cares more about how the reader perceives Ilya than she does about Shane's characterization.
In these novels, Shane can never be mad at Ilya when Ilya is actively trying to hurt Shane's feelings, because Reid has Shane constantly able to perfectly understand the source of Ilya's behavior and his true desires. And then she has Shane prioritize that over his own feelings, because the most important thing to her is for the reader to feel like Ilya's hurtful behavior is minimized and not actually harmful. Shane is given no space or grace for his own feelings, because the narrative doesn't consider them important.
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