Acting on Impulse, by Vicki Lewis Thompson

I'm ready to give Blaze another try. Vicki Lewis Thompson's Acting on Impulse looks good, so here I go.

Blurb:

"Small-town girl Trudy Baxter is ready to take on New York City. She's looking for excitement, adventure...and incredible sex! She wants to experience every little thing — and every type of man — the city has to offer. Her first target — sexy Wall Street hunk Linc Faulkner. Only, once she gets Linc into her bed, she's reluctant to let him go....

Linc Faulkner has never met anybody like Trudy. She's so spirited, so sexy, so damn uninhibited! She's his every fantasy in the flesh. Only, Linc knows he's just the first man on Trudy's sexual wish list. So what else can he do but convince her that he can be any man she'll ever want — and the only man she'll ever need...."

I really like the covers on the Blaze line. They convey the message that they are HOT, HOT, HOT! as well as modern, because they do so without descending into tacky clinchdom. Point for Harlequin here. And most of the titles aren't bad either. All they have to do now is lose the repressed, 30-year-old virgins in them, and they're in business.

Posted later...

I finished Acting on Impulse last night, and it was great, an A.

This one was exactly what I thought Blazes were supposed to be like. Plus, this is one of my favourite storylines, but it's very easy for an author to screw it up, which thankfully, the author didn't do.

Trudy really rang true for me, and enjoyed her imagination very much. And Linc was really lovely, a nice guy, completely beta, and with some vulnerabilities. I appreciated that we could actually see Trudy and Linc falling in love with each encounter, and none of these were just gratuitous sex scenes: each added a layer to their personalities. In other Blazes, I've found that the authors tend to go a bit overboard with sex scene after sex scene, and they get a bit boring after a time. Not here. And the scene were they broke up was heartwrenching, and the final scene was really romantic and moving. The part in Virtue... not so good. I don't need to be hit over the head with how caring and what a good father a guy is. But it was good to see Trudy conclude that, though she loves Virtue, she doesn't want to live there; she much prefers the big city. The city was almost a character in this book, BTW, and I thought it was great to see a romance celebrating life in the Big Apple and not equating it with evil!

I loved Trudy's relationship with Meg. Romance heroines so often don't have a girlfriend with whom to share and dish about men. It was nice to see differently here.

My only problem with this book was Meg herself. She was incredibly irritating. When I first started I was sure that she and Tom must have been characters in another book, and I wanted to read it. After finishing it, I don't think I want to read it after seeing her being so arrogant and condescending.