Review: Stranger

Review: Stranger by Megan Hart

For starters, I'm a funeral director taking over my dad's business. Not exactly the kind of person you'd expect to fork over cash for the lust and urgency only live skin-to-skin contact can create. Looking at me, you wouldn't have a clue I carry this little secret so close it creases up like the folds of a fan. Tight. Personal. Ready to unravel in the heat of the moment.

Unsurprisingly, my line of work brings me face-to-face with loss. So I decided long ago that paying for sex would be one of the best (and arousing) ways to save myself from the one thing that would eventually cut far too deep.

But Sam was a mistake. Literally, I signed on to "pick up" a stranger at a bar, but I took Sam home instead. And now that I've felt his heat, his sweat and everything else, can I really go back to impersonal?

Let's just hope that he never finds out about my other life...

Megan Hart's characters continue to fascinate me. Her writing is both amazingly simple and intensely complex making her first person narratives flow seamlessly. While sexually erotic, her novels also embody a stark reality that resonates with real life and real people. Megan Hart is an author who deserves to be on top.

There is one garishly loud technical problem with Grace Frawley owning Frawley & Sons and that being the obvious. Living in a small town leaves Grace with limited clients. But after working tirelessly, cutting her pay down to the minimum, and ramping up marketing opportunities, she's been able to pull the business back from the brink of closing. This, of course is unrecognized by her anal retired father who needs to find a hobby that doesn't involve checking up on Grace's every move as far as the business is concerned. Yet despite her father's recriminations, Grace is good at her job and she loves her work. While some may think a funeral director and it's corresponding job objectives as being morbid, Grace would say the very opposite. She is there to help people through the most difficult time of their lives. Not only does she help bury their loved ones in the most respectable manner possible but she is also there to assuage their grief by lending them a hand of understanding.

Grace also has a little secret...

Grace awaits him at a local bar. She's there to meet a stranger, a stranger in fact but not in the sense whereby stars align and fate bestows the one. Grace has paid in advance for this meeting with her stranger and she hopes to get exactly what she paid for, and boy does she ever. His name is Sam and he gives Grace the most gratifying sex that she's ever had. The only problem - Grace didn't pay for Sam. Her hired rent-a-boy happened to be late and Sam truly was a stranger...

While confident in her own skin, Grace is not confident in her life. Death and grief have marked her soul, leaving her with only one option - protection. Terrified of one day losing a husband, Grace has made the decision that she'll never allow a man close enough to cause her pain when he is gone. Her paid escorts provide a scratch to an itch and the impersonal quality of their dates gives Grace comfort. But two men are going to change Grace's life, one is Sam and the other is Jack.

Jack and his jaw-dropping, pantie-wetting, and immobilizing megawatt smile steals Grace's heart from almost day one. Fresh after her wild night with Sam the stranger, Grace is looking for any man to take her mind off her lingering and arousing thoughts of him. Her escort service has paired her with a man who is different from Grace's general type with his tattoos and body hardware, plus he's young but boy can he smile. Jack, new to the business but eager to learn, takes Grace through some of her most daring sexual escapades that are heavy on the role play. Yet as the layers pull apart one by one, Grace finds that she really likes Jack. For the first time in a long time, a man knows her.

Meanwhile, fate has stepped in again. Sam hurls back into Grace's life with the tragic death of his father. After mistaking him for a burglar and nearly bludgeoning him with a golf club, the heat between Sam and Grace erupts with as much force as before. But Grace, terrified of Sam's effect on her, denies his attempts for a relationship at every opportunity. But Sam's persistence pays off.

For the first time in long line of paid dates, Jack and Grace have unpaid sex. Dropping their masks, the two have true sex and it's during this one moment of pure reality that Grace imagines that it's Sam, not Jack. It's at this moment that Grace realizes that her yearning for Sam has reached the ultimate crescendo and she decides to give him the chance he's been begging for.

Yet as their relationship blossoms so does Sam's drinking. While outwardly he may appear like his father's death has meant little, his drinking shows something else entirely. As her job and family pressure escalates, Grace finally breaks down and tells her secret to Sam. Now with the ball in his court, can Sam accept Grace's past or will it just be the icing on the cake that will send him along with his drinking to an early grave?

I loved this story. I stayed up all night reading it in order to discover whether or not Sam and Grace would be able to work out their differences and try to make a life together. Hart writes some of the best erotic love scenes in the genre. Each experience it new and each provides further growth of her characters. 'Stranger' was stunning and I challenge my blogger friends to give this author a chance.

A

Think you might like 'Stranger'? Click here for more details and excerpts.

Interested in Megan Hart? Check out my reviews of 'Dirty' and 'Tempted'

Coming Soon...

Release Date: July 2009

Back Cover Blurb:

Some lovers never leave you...

Twenty years ago she had her whole life spread out before her like a mesmerizing map. She was Bess Walsh, a fresh-scrubbed, middle-class student ready to conquer the design world. And she was taken. Absolutely and completely.

But not by Andy, her well-groomed, intellectual boyfriend who hinted more than once about a ring. No. During that hot summer as a waitress and living on the beach, she met Nick, a dark haired, local bad boy. He was, to put it mildly, not someone she could take home to Daddy.

Instead, Nick became her dirty little secret; a fervent sexual accomplice who knew how to ignite an all-consuming obsession she had no idea she carried deep within her.

Bess had always wondered what happened to Nick after that summer, after their promise to meet again. And now, back at the beach house and taking a break from responsibility, from marriage, from life, she discovers his heartbreaking fate--and why he never came back for her. Suddenly Nick's name is on her lips...his hands on her thighs...dark hair and eyes called back from the swirling gray of purgatory's depths.

Dead, alive, or something in-between, they can't stop their hunger.

She wouldn't dare.

Click here for more details and here for an excerpt.