Scoring, by Kristin Hardy

I've just finished Scoring, the second book in Kristin Hardy's Under the Covers series, of which I loved the first book, My Sexiest Mistake.

Becka has just dumped her louse of a boyfriend and gotten her dream job as the trainer/therapist for a professional sports team. Granted, it's only the Lowell Weavers minor league baseball team, but it's a start. She's finished with settling when it comes to relationships and figures it's time for focus on her career and herself for a while.

Hunky Mace Duvall was gorgeous enough to make the Most Beautiful People list and talented enough to be an All-Star player until an auto accident cut him down in his prime. A year later, when he arrives at Lowell for his first assignment as a batting instructor, he's trying to figure out how to move on with his life. Mace's undeserved reputation as a playboy precedes him, and Becka wants nothing to do with him. But Mace has decided to live for today and earn that playboy reputation, starting with the delectable Becka.

This was nice, one of the good Blaze books, but not as good as the author's first. A B.

I've read many stinky horrible Blazes, many, many mediocre ones and only some good ones. My track record is really not very good with the line, so what keeps me coming back? It's just that when these books are good, they give me something I simply don't get in other lines. No, it's not the hot sex ;-) It's characters who feel young. Or rather, young characters who feel realistic. That's what I get from Blaze authors like Vicki Lewis Thompson, Jo Leigh and yes, Kristin Hardy.

Her characters have normal sex lives and they basically have the lifestyles of 20-somethings. I'm not saying they sleep with anything that moves, or that their lives are like those of the characters of Sex and the City (who are not 20-somethings anyway), they just don't feel like middle-aged people whose chronollogical age happens to start with a "2". Both Becka and Mace are like this. I can't really pinpoint an instance of behaviour where I can say "aha, this is young", but they felt right for people my age.

Oh, and BTW, I especially liked how Becka found the fact that the hero had had a not very discriminating sexual history unattractive (never mind that he actually was a "fake rake" and all those stories were lies). At last, a heroine who doesn't find a playboy guy sexy, and who doesn't hesitate to call him on it.

Apart from this, though, I didn't find the actual story particularly involving. I liked the characters themselves and I liked reading about them, but the story about them simply didn't capture my imagination. Maybe part of it is that I know absolutely nothing about baseball, so this whole aspect didn't interest me.

I wasn't crazy about the ending, either. Becka's behaviour there was more than a little TSTL and out of character.

Still, not bad. I'll continue to buy this author's books.