This is book two of the Underground Encounters series and the main characters are firefighter Maya and club owner Tristan. Tristan avoids people, believing he is cursed to only see the darkness in people, until the night he spots a woman in his club, Vamps, and can see a light surround her. Maya hadn’t been to the club for a year, ever since it burnt down and her fellow firefighter and best friend Nike left town suddenly. Now it has a new owner, Tristan, and on Halloween, Maya goes to the club to get her boogie on. He needs to find out who she is and why she has this light around her, instead of all the darkness and sadness he senses off everyone else. He catches up to her and they end up dancing together briefly and he doesn’t want to let her go. Normally he would spend his nights in his lab under the club floor, only coming up to check on his staff every couple of hours. He asks what is so special about her, but she doesn’t quite realise what he means, as he comes from a long family of witches, with differing powers. She has her own secret, but has never actually thought of it as magic, having never known her birth parents and being raised by a normal couple.
She loves her firefighting job, but is now the only female in the station, which leaves all the bloke comments on just her. She tries to contact her friend Nike, but she is somewhere in Europe apparently, with her lover Michal, and doesn’t really keep in touch. She could really do with her BF to talk to! She keeps away from the club for a few weeks, making Tristan worry he might never see her again, but she has to see him again eventually, feeling drawn to him as well. Their relationship starts explosively, hot and steamy, and he evens asks her to his mother’s home to meet his parents, before they have even gone on a proper first date! She will soon find out that there is more to the world around her that she ever knew. He takes her to a local cemetery to find out if she can see what he can, but she is different than he expected and eventually trusts him enough to share her secret. His experiments have still not stopped what he considers his curse and it weighs on him heavily, affecting his mood and life. Only when he can figure out what he really needs, will the truth of their combined magics come about and a future together be what he most desires. As usual, any relationships has to go through its ups and downs, before it can settle into what it should have been all along. Having what he considered a curse on his head, made life around others hard for Tristan, even when it came to Maya, and he has to work to overcome the mistakes he makes..
I received an ARC copy of this book from BookSprout and I have freely given my own opinion of the book above.
4 ½ stars