Auntee's Reviews > Instant Attraction

Hmmn. It's going to be hard to decide what rating I want to give this book. It started out pretty promising--good girl accountant Katie Kramer has a life altering experience (being the lone survivor of a bridge collapse that killed 30 people) and now doesn't want to take life for granted. She wants to live her life "balls to the wall", as she puts it, wanting to experience things that she'd usually never consider, living one daredevil escapade after another. That's all she wants before she returns to her old life, that, and some amazing sex. She hops in her car, leaving L.A. and heading for wherever the road takes her. She winds up in the tiny mountain town of Wishful, California, and takes a temporary office job working for Wilder Adventures and Expeditions. There's three Wilder brothers and an aunt and uncle, and they run a company that fulfills vacationers extreme sports fantasies. All is going well until one night, Katie wakes up to find the 'prodigal son' has returned, and he's hovering over her bed.

Cameron Wilder has not had an idyllic childhood. Illegitimate son of a mother who left the family when he was born, and a biological father he never knew, the father who raised him gave him up at the age of eight to Cam's young 18 year old aunt. Cam loved the mountain life and the winter sports, and became a champion snowboarder and Olympic medalist. But he was not as successful in his personal life, having had one girlfriend try to run him over, and having his fiancee cheat on him. While preoccupied with thoughts of his fiancee's cheating, he has an accident while snowboarding that tears up his knee, ending his career. After recuperating and bumming around Europe for a year, he finally decides to head home to California. His brothers want him to take an active part in the family business, and Cam's got nothing better to do. After all, his life as he knows it is over, right?

Then Cam meets Katie, and there's a spark. Her attitude and sunny disposition starts to get to him, and he finds himself actually 'feeling' again. He wants to be around her, and he starts enjoyong life like he hasn't done in a long time. And while the attraction is there for Katie too, she's going to be leaving soon, on to bigger and better adventures, and starting something with her would be wrong. He doesn't need anyone falling for him, he'll just end up hurting her. But Katie doesn't care if their relationship goes nowhere, she just wants the experience--no regrets. So Katie and Cam get together--and it's good. She gets her amazing sex, and then some. It's so good that Katie eventually admits to herself that she's fallen for him. Now what does she do? Could Cam possibly feel the same way? Does he even have the courage to love and let himself be loved?

Cam started out as one of the most grim, morose heroes I've read about in a while. At times his self-pitying really got to me. Did he think his snowboarding career was going to last forever? Did he even have a plan for the rest of his life? He was definitely a "glass half empty" kind of guy. And I have to say that the guy on the cover of the book fit his description perfectly--grim. And I got the feeling that his family (especially his aunt--who was featured in a subplot of her own) enabled him. They were so afraid of him running off that they didn't say to him what needed to be said. But thankfully Katie did. She called him on his attitude and didn't let him get away with it. She was the one who finally got him to open up and talk (something his whole family had trouble doing). I was just hoping that he had enough sense to see that Katie was the best thing that ever happened to him. Luckily by the end of the book he got his head out of his a** and realized that he had the rest of his life to live, and there was a special woman who he wanted to live it with.

So, Cam was not one of my favorite heroes of all time, but Katie was one of my favorite heroines. She's the reason why I continued to read, while Cam was frustrating the heck out of me. I wanted to see her get her HEA, and if she could get Cam to agree to take a chance on love and life. The ending was sweet and satisfying. And I will definitely give the other books in the series a try. Cam's older brothers seem interesting, as do the women that it looks like they'll be paired up with.

All in all a little frustrating, a little more satisfying, with an ending that gave me a smile on my face--4 stars.