Why I read it: I received a review copy from the publisher via NetGalley. (In the interests of full disclosure: The author and I often chat on Twitter and I met her when I went to Sydney recently.)

What it’s about: (from Goodreads) They’re a car crash waiting to happen…so why do they keep crashing into each other?

From the moment Fetch gets knocked off his Harley, crawls into Driver’s car and offers her an obscene amount of money to drive him from Sydney to Perth — no questions, no names, no chit chat — they’re stuck with each other. By the time they arrive, they’re stuck on each other.

It’s lust at full throttle, with no seat belts. It could be more, but he’s a fake and she’s a liar. They’re both neck deep in crime, and only one of them is on the right side of the law.

What worked for me (and what didn’t): There were so many things to like about this book. I loved that the main characters (Cait and Sean) were together for almost the whole of the book (yay for road trip books!). It was a relatively long book (these days I expect maybe 200 pages so 330 means long) and there was plenty of time for the characters to be developed, to get to know one another, for the sexual tension to build and still get all the payoff of those things later on without being rushed. I loved that Cait and Sean took time to get to know each other before things turned physical. There was a point where tension became combustible and Sean cranks it up yet another notch – I felt it both fit the story but was also a clever way of increasing the readerly tension of “when will they get it on!” and I appreciated that it wasn’t drawn out unnecessarily.

Cait and Sean spend a lot of the book lying to each other in one way or another but it is mostly Cait who cannot tell Sean the truth. It wasn’t a big misunderstanding book (thank goodness). Even when I thought Cait should have told Sean sooner I wasn’t quite expecting all that she had to say and when she finally did, it became blindingly obvious why she was so reticent. This next is mildly spoilerish so I’m going to hide it

Spoiler

I was half expecting that Cait’s guilty secret was going to be something not so bad, something she hadn’t realised was not really a huge problem. But that wasn’t the case. Cait was right to be guilty (although it wasn’t a hanging offence either so it didn’t make her unsympathetic) and she was right to be scared of Justin and worried about Sean’s reaction to the truth. I’m so very glad the story didn’t go into “oh, is that all it was!” territory because the rest of it was smart and Cait was no dummy.

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There is a very Australian flavour to the story. I’m not sure whether overseas readers would be confused by some of the references (I’m happy to answer any questions about the vernacular if anyone has any because I think it’s a book that deserves to find a wide audience). For Australian readers, there is maybe a little tingle to see Australian music referred to, and the Australian landscape. (Although, Port Augusta, as far as I know, isn’t generally known for its romantic ambience.) The motorcycle gang in this story is more like we read in the papers here and see on TV in shows such as Underbelly. There is no romanticising of them. They are depicted as outlaws, criminals, drug pushers and money launderers – there are no romantic heroes in these MCs.

“Fetch” (Sean) is an undercover cop in the Bikie Task Force. I thought the challenges of being undercover, of shaking off one persona and taking on another, of trying to go back to the original when it’s all over, were well drawn and the police, in general, were painted as competent without being superheroes. The story itself is clever and action-packed – particularly toward the end. The middle of the book is less about any threat to the main characters and more about their inner journey to their HEA but I didn’t ever feel that the pacing was off. The middle part is slower and more introspective and relationship focused but it’s not boring. This is not a book where the main couple are having sex when the bullets are flying – I appreciated that the story made sense – I cannot overstate this. The story actually works as something I could imagine happening. Sure there’s some coincidence which is probably unlikely but the characters did things that the story set up to be reasonable decisions, their relationship was able to grow as they travelled from Sydney to Perth because for part of that time (a fair chunk) they aren’t in imminent danger. And when things get willing towards the end, well that made sense too. (There is really only one caveat I have to that – I didn’t quite understand why Fetch was okay to make a reappearance – but that may be on me.)

Sean is very good at reading people – given the nature of his job, that reading people and situations properly could make the difference between life or death for him, that’s perfectly reasonable. He could read Cait – who wasn’t a very good liar in the best of situations but it didn’t feel like he had superpowers – he was just very observant.

The highlight of the book, apart from the cracker story, is the banter between Sean and Cait. Cait has all these “rules” for what can and cannot happen in her car. Sean breaks every single one of them and a few she hadn’t thought of as he demolishes her protective force field and gets to the heart of her. Cait gives back as good as she gets though and it is, in part, the intellectual challenge of sparring with her that helps Sean come back to himself. There is a snap and sizzle to the dialogue, as well as reading like things people would actually say.

The writing is fairly heavy on adjective usage – sometimes this worked really well for me, like here:

He gave off nothing but companionable silence for the next two hours. It drove her absolutely, become a nail-biter, crazy. Sean did something to silence that made you want to examine it for flaws, pull it apart and stitch it back together with rhythm and noise at its heart. He made it absence and longing.

Other times it felt just a little too heavy handed for me. I noticed particularly in the sex scenes that there were… kind of word pictures formed – little snapshots to give a glimpse of the action but not much real description. I imagine it to be the word equivalent of a movie or tv scene which is told in strobe-like flashes. While in some ways it was refreshing to have little by way of “tab A into slot B” in the book, I wouldn’t have minded a little more explicit language. Not because I wanted the story to be dirtier but more because I’m a person who doesn’t like ambiguity and some of the love scenes felt a little… vague.

No kiss they’d ever shared was like this one. It was shaped from passion, built with lust and carved from truth. It fused them together with soft smiles and nonsense murmurs. It carried them away to a timeless place, to a gentle landscape, to a notion of forever.
Then it burned. It clawed, it pulled and pushed and dragged and bit. It was hot skin and scalding mouths. It was ripped away clothing. It was miscalculating the edge of the bed and sliding to the hard floor. It was sightless eyes and inarticulate sounds, and discomfort that wasn’t and sensation that was, and being lost, lost, lost in hands and lips and teeth and thrusts and rolling hips, and wave on wave of spiralling pleasure, with exhausting, screaming peaks and deep, deep oblivious falls.

This is my first book from this author so I don’t know if this kind of love scene is trademark for her and it wasn’t so much that I disliked what I read. It was just that I would have liked, interspersed within it, some more of the practical and … actual. If that makes sense.

What else? The story is told from the deep third person POV of Cait and Sean in alternating chapters so I felt I had a good handle on what their motivations were and how they were thinking, growing and changing over the course of the story. I like that Sean fell first – that he questioned whether it was a reaction to being in the real world after so long as Fetch, and realised that rather than that being the case, it was the reason he was able to know he should grasp onto her and not let go.

There was no place he didn’t want to touch her or have her touch him. No thought he didn’t want to share with her, no emotion he was too proud to show her.

Sean does tell Cait what to do a lot in the book and this is a constant source of friction between them. Cait, for various reasons, has decided she is taking control of her life and even for Sean, she will not hand over the reins. She makes her own decisions and he doesn’t get to decide. It takes a long time (maybe a little too long) for Sean to really get this in a way that it was embedded but I think he pretty much did by the end of the book. I loved that they agreed that they would work through any problems in the future together – honestly, sensible and mature is so sexy I can’t even tell you.