Glory Bound, by Billie Green

I'm having an extremely hard time wading through the apparently much beloved This Is All I Ask. In fact, the only reason I'm still at it is that I'm supposed to read it for one of my groups. Last night I just couldn't bear to read one more page of stupid characters behaving stupidly, and needed a quick break, so I grabbed the shortest thing I could find in my TBR, one of the pile of old Loveswepts I picked up at random at the UBS. It was Glory Bound, by Billie Green, an author completely unknown to me.

Alan Spencer knew his blind date with an important client's eligible daughter would be a disaster - weren't all such arranged encounters? But from the moment he met Glory Wainwright and looked into her sapphire-blue eyes, he began to believe again in romantic miracles.

Glory did her best to discourage the attentions of the impossibly good-looking executive whose fierce interest threatened her very secret other life -the one her father knew nothing about. But Alan never took no for an answer -not in business, and not in love. He vowed to track down the fascinating and elusive lady whose gaze bound him to her in a raging fire as old as time... and to unravel the sensual web she'd wrapped around his heart...

Glory Bound was a very welcome breath of fresh air. Not a particularly wonderful story, but one that was fun and pleasant, with some nice touches. A B-.

She creates some very interesting characters. I especially liked Glory, whose double life was necessary and pretty heroic, and Alan reminded me why I was so fond of the Loveswept line, with its lack of overbearing, macho heroes. This is a 1986 book, and there really weren't so many genuinely kind, funny, beta guys like Alan back then.

I really liked the plot, especially the first half, with Alan becoming increasingly attracted by Glory with every meeting, while she keeps running from him. These two had very real chemistry, even if the whole pretty much otherworldly experience whenever they kissed was a bit much. The last part of the book wasn't as good, and I lost quite a bit of interest in their romance, but it wasn't that bad.

Green has a sense of humour that really clicked with me. It is a quirky, but gentle and understated brand of humour, and it had me smiling the entire book. The first scene, in which Alan is besotted by his client's daughter and she does her best to discourage his interest, was priceless, and there were quite a few things like that in the book. Green never overworks a joke, never goes over the top. She just sets the situation just right and trusts her readers to get it. Glory's roomates would probably have been turned into cartoons by most authors, but Green just makes them weird but very, very human.

Next time I'm near that UBS I'm definitely going to be going through the shelves and searching for more by this author.