About Last Night, by Ruthie Knox

TITLE: About Last Night
AUTHOR: Ruthie Knox

COPYRIGHT: 2012
PAGES: 248
PUBLISHER: Loveswept

SETTING: Contemporary England
TYPE: Romance
SERIES: None

Cath Talarico knows a mistake when she makes it, and God knows she’s made her share. So many, in fact, that this Chicago girl knows London is her last, best shot at starting over. But bad habits are hard to break, and soon Cath finds herself back where she has vowed never to go . . . in the bed of a man who is all kinds of wrong: too rich, too classy, too uptight for a free-spirited troublemaker like her.Nev Chamberlain feels trapped and miserable in his family’s banking empire. But beneath his pinstripes is an artist and bohemian struggling to break free and lose control. Mary Catherine—even her name turns him on—with her tattoos, her secrets, and her gamine, sex-starved body, unleashes all kinds of fantasies.When blue blood mixes with bad blood, can a couple that is definitely wrong for each other ever be perfectly right? And with a little luck and a lot of love, can they make last night last a lifetime?

Cath Talarico spent most of her teens and early twenties making bad decisions she now regrets. Determined to turn her life around, she decided to move from Chicago to London and only make sensible, sober decisions from then on, and concentrate on building a career as a museum curator. It's been going relatively well. She's been good at resisting temptation, and has managed to get a foot into the really-hard-to-break-into museum world.

And then one night, against her instincts, she accepts a blind date. It goes as badly as she guessed it would, and after a couple ill-advised drinks, Cath finds herself on the train home pretty much off her face.

The man who comes to her rescue is another regular on her train journey every morning. Cath has come to know most of the passengers who travel at the same time as her, and has nicknames for each. This handsome, elegant man in a perfect suit she calls "City".

City is Nev Chamberlain (yes, I know, the name never stops being ridiculous, unfortunately, and neither is it a believable one, given what we see of his family). As Cath guessed, he is indeed a banker from a wealthy family and works in the City. But this is not the life Nev wants. He's let his family pressure him into the family business, but he hates every minute, and wishes he was back home with his paintings.

Cath is just as irresistible to Nev as he is to her. However, while he sees in Cath the right woman for him, she's convinced her attraction to Nev is yet another example of her wanting something that is bad for her, and thus is determined not to give in. The chemistry between them is scorching, and even better, you get a sense of them clicking together as people as well, as they spend time together.

I had only two issues with this, neither of them too bad. First, Knox brings in some only-in-romance-novels plot devices which would have fit better in a Harlequin Presents than in a book with such realistically modern characters. I did like what she did with those plot devices, how she played with them, but they still felt out of place here. Also, I felt some of Nev's dialogue felt a little bit off sometimes, like when he called Cath "love" right after they'd met. That's got some very distinct class markers here, and is really not something someone with Nev's background would say.

Still, this was a very enjoyable book, and I enjoyed it almost as much as Ride With Me.

MY GRADE: A B.