Catalina 'Lina' Martín

Catalina "Lina" Martin is the Spanish-American protagonist of Elena Armas's romance novel The Spanish Love Deception — a brilliant structural engineer working in New York City who has accidentally told her family back in Spain that she has an American boyfriend, and who now faces the prospect of attending her sister's wedding alone and exposed. Her solution: convince her insufferable, arrogant American colleague Aaron Blackford to pretend to be her boyfriend for the trip.

Armas writes Lina with warmth and comedy — she is competent and ambitious at work, deeply loving toward her family, and wonderfully terrible at managing her feelings about Aaron, whom she has convinced herself she dislikes entirely. The enemies-to-lovers dynamic is developed with the slow-burn patience that makes the eventual romantic resolution genuinely satisfying.

The Spanish setting of the wedding sections gives the novel a vivid cultural specificity — Lina's family dynamics, her relationship with her hometown, and the specific texture of a Spanish family gathering are rendered with the knowledge and affection of someone writing about their own culture. The Spanish Love Deception became a major BookTok phenomenon and launched Armas's career as one of contemporary romance's most popular authors.

Read before The American Roommate Experiment, which follows Rosie and Lucas.