Friday, April 04, 2003

Sleeping With The Enemy, by Jamie Denton

After this, I read a Harlequin Blaze. It was Sleeping With the Enemy, by Jamie Denton.
FBI agent Chase Bracken has the unsavory job of tracking down a rogue agent. His only solid lead is the guy's sisters, sexy Dr. Dee Romine. Working undercover, Bracken will do anything to get his man...or woman. Including making love to the delectable doctor.

Dee is overwhelmed by the new "high school coach" in town. Chase seems to have infiltrated her life, her senses, her body...in a short time. She's breaking her own rules and letting emotions sway her. And Dee's certain he's done the same. Yet something doesn't add up.

C+. Not bad, but it had some problems. I liked the main protagonists, even if Chase took a while to win me over. He was such a bastard at the beginning, perfectly willing to use Dee to further his career, perfectly willing to break the law and violate her civil rights for this. But slowly, by seeing how he felt about her and how he started having doubts about what he was doing, I warmed up to him. An yes, even if it was a pretty manipulative, he got me when he told Dee about his childhood.

The love scenes were pretty hot, only some safe sex aspects bothered me. Basically, that after all the emphasis on Dee teaching safe sex to the teenagers at the school, she has unprotected sex with Chase. And it's not only the instance when they get carried away, they also have oral sex without a condom. Yeah, I wouldn't mind this in another book, but this book makes much about Dee being an expert, so I hold it to higher standards.

Anyway, that was just a niggle. More important were my problems with the style, especially with the dialogue. There was a lot of internal monologue between remarks, which broke the flow of the dialogue and made it hard to follow, because by the time someone said something, I had forgotten what the last remark had been.

Also, it bothered me that the Jared situation was unresolved. If I'd known I'd have to read another book to get the whole story, maybe I wouldn't have minded so much, but this caught me by surprise and it bugged me.