I’m on a Lissa Matthews kick at the moment, and I’m a sucker for racing car drivers… this could have been written especially for me * grin *.
Lily is a quiet and curvaceous woman with two passions in life: music and stock car racing. She jumps at the chance to spend two weeks in North Carolina and finds herself at an autograph signing session for popular driver Cam Carter. He’s as thrilling off the track as he is behind the wheel and Lily watches, mesmerised, as he signs her friend’s t-shirt. Walking past him, he tugs on her shirtsleeve and asks her boldly – to the amusement of the waiting line - if she doesn’t like him.
Dark sapphire eyes danced with merriment, and she couldn’t help but return the smile. “I like you just fine.”
She didn’t like to be the focus of attention in groups of people. She preferred to just blend in, stand on the outside, observe. The way people were staring at them made her uncomfortable. The way Cam was staring at her made her uncomfortable in a completely different way.
As she gawks at him, he signs a photograph and scrawls his phone number on the back… along with a time and date and a place to meet.
Cam wasn’t sure he wanted to tell anyone about it, about her. It wasn’t like him to try and pick up women in the autograph line – or any line at all, for that matter – but something about the woman named Lily had intrigued him. He wanted her. Plain and simple.
He’s thrilled when Lily shows up.
“I have nothing else that I’m needed for until tomorrow, so that means I’m all yours tonight.”
“Oh.” She likely hadn’t hidden the surprise at his choice of words, because he laughed. All hers? Yeah right. In what universe was a man like Cam Carter ever going to be “all hers”?
She is nothing like the women Cam usually dates and he’s smitten.
She wasn’t flashy, wasn’t a size 4, wasn’t the same kind of woman who held the arms of his friends and fellow drivers. Maybe that’s what drew him to her. He was different, and so was she.
I love the way Lissa Matthews makes her characters real. You feel their angst and their delight, and you desperately want them to be happy. Right from the first electric date, theirs is a passionate and exciting story. Did I also mention that Lissa Matthews writes some of the hottest sex scenes?
“Inside you, Lily. I need inside you. Wallet. Condom.”
He was speaking in one-word phrases, but he couldn’t help it. He was afraid if she so much as breathed in his direction, he was going to come right then and there and look like an amateur at making love to a woman.
Even though they’re madly in lust, their worlds are too different. Lily fears that when she returns to Florida, Cam will move on to the next woman. And if that wasn’t bad enough, his crew chief is getting worried.
"All this time he’s been spending with you makes me think his head isn’t in the right place. He’s running for a championship, and he’s not going to get it if he continues to be distracted."
“Are you asking me to stop seeing him?”
It’s a short, hot read and one that had me hooked from the opening page. Enough bumps in the road to make them work at it, and enough sweet times to make it satisfying. I was especially thrilled when I mailed Lissa Matthews to ask if there might be a follow-up to Stick Shift, to feature some of Cam’s fellow drivers and she said there may be :-)
5 out of 5.