A Nix Review – Flirting with Disaster by Ruthie Knox (5 Stars)

Posted July 3, 2013 by Nix in Uncategorized / 1 Comment

In the latest eBook original novel in Ruthie Knox’s scorching-hot Camelot series, a no-strings fling looks an awful lot like falling in love—or flirting with disaster.

Fresh out of a fiasco of a marriage, Katie Clark has retreated to her hometown to start over. The new Katie is sophisticated, cavalier, and hell-bent on kicking butt at her job in her brother’s security firm. But on her first assignment—digging up the truth about the stalker threatening a world-famous singer-songwriter—Katie must endure the silent treatment from a stern but sexy partner who doesn’t want her help . . . or her company.

Sean Owens knows that if he opens his mouth around Katie, she’ll instantly remember him as the geeky kid who sat behind her in high school. Silence is golden, but he can’t keep quiet forever, not with Katie stampeding through their investigation. It’s time for Sean to step up and take control of the case, and his decade-old crush. If he can break through Katie’s newfound independence, they just might find they make a perfect team—on the road, on the job, and in bed.

I got this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I do not know the author but do consider myself a fan. There you go….

I fricking loved this book. It had everything that I ever want in a romance and it was scorching hot to boot; how could I not love it!

Sean Owens is a geek hero…a geek with a stammer. He was so cool, calm and collected until he got around our heroine and then he was so nervous that he could not speak to her for fear of stammering. It made me ache that he considered his speech difficulties such an issue that he would rather be silent than be heard to stammer. In every other walk of life he had managed to make himself into what he considered a success but in this he could not control his own body. I wanted to give him a big cuddle but, of course, he had to come to his own conclusions about himself and see that, in the long run, it didn’t really matter. On another note I want to give some kudos to the author for dealing with this storyline with sensitivity and accuracy. It is much appreciated when an author does effective research and everything from Sean’s demeanor to his language techniques smacked of realism and were used seamlessly in the tale. I adored Sean.

Katie was brilliant as a heroine. At the start she is fixated on getting her teen idol into bed but she soon realises that Sean is the one that she is attracted to. I admired her ability to be sure in her own feelings and her determination to get her hands on what she wanted, whether I agreed with her choice of bed mate or not. Of course I wanted her to get together with Sean, but I understood her reticence; he literally did not say a word to her for a third of the book. I was reading from Sean’s POV, therefore knew his reasoning, but it must have seemed awfully rude! Once she started a relationship with him, she gave everything she could within the parameters that he set. She knew he was leaving, did her best to protect her heart from a relationship that he didn’t want, but, ultimately, had to face some difficult choices. I didn’t know how she could possibly break through the walls that he had built around his heart.

Both of them had to work together to find the “celebrity stalker” which gave them opportunity for love to blossom or fail. I loved the way that each their own role in the team and neither one of them undermined the other. The supportive way that they worked together on this case told me that they would make an excellent couple; I could only hope that they could get over the baggage that Sean carried with him. Of course, I also had to hope that he would stick around after the case finished.

The heat in this book was immense. After reading the last in the series, and finding it quite sweet, I did not expect this. The chemistry between the two of them was evident in every scene that they were in and I’m pretty sure I steamed up some windows with the heat I was emitting just reading it! It was fabulously sexy.

Overall, this is a sexy, engaging and heart-warming book. The small amount of angst that it contains creates a lovely underlying tension that kept me turning page after page and being quite upset when I realised that it was all over.