Until It Fades by K.A. Tucker

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Title: Until It Fades
Author: K.A. Tucker
Published by: Atria Books
Release Date: June 27, 2017
Format: Kobo Book
Pages: 370
Genres: Contemporary, Romance
Reading Challenges: Lenoreo's 2023 Backlist Reader Challenge, Lenoreo's 2023 COYER Chapter 3
Find it: Goodreads ✩ Amazon ✩ B&N ✩ Google ✩ Kobo ✩ iBooks
My rating:

Blurb:

A sexy new romance about a small-town woman who saves the life of a mysterious man, and finds herself unexpectedly thrown into a whirlwind love affair, featuring bestselling author K. A. Tucker’s signature “well-constructed, pulse-pounding suspense” (USA TODAY).

Twenty-four-year-old truck stop waitress and single mother Catherine Wright has simple goals: to give her five-year-old daughter a happy life and to never again be the talk of the town in Balsam, Pennsylvania: population two thousand outside of tourist season.

And then one foggy night, on a lonely road back from another failed attempt at a relationship, Catherine saves a man’s life. It isn’t until after the police have arrived that Catherine realizes exactly who it is she has saved: Brett Madden, hockey icon and media darling.

Catherine has already had her fifteen minutes of fame and the last thing she wants is to have her past dragged back into the spotlight, only this time on a national stage. So she hides her identity. It works.

For a time.

But when she finds the man she saved standing on her doorstep, desperate to thank her, all that changes. What begins as an immediate friendship quickly turns into something neither of them expected. Something that Catherine isn’t sure she can handle; something that Catherine is afraid to trust.

Because how long can an extraordinary man like Brett be interested in an ordinary woman like Catherine…before the spark fades?

My Review:

4 stars — Ha!  I started this one stupidly at 1am when we had been out late and I couldn’t fall asleep right away thinking I would just read a chapter or two…next thing I know it’s 4am, and I’m forcing myself to put it down.  The same thing happened the next night.  So to say that I was sucked in from the start is a bit of an understatement.  It was a super fun, easy, compelling read that had me aching to know how things were going to unfold, especially in the first half.  Which is not to say that there were a lot of twists and turns…in fact, there were some very predictable parts to the story.  But knowing vaguely how something is going to go is a lot different from knowing the specifics you know?  And with this story, I wanted to know the specifics.

Catherine was a complicated heroine to follow and love.  There were parts of her that I seriously enjoyed, and I really appreciated seeing how she had grown over the years.  She was likable, caring, humble, with a hint of sass to her.  But a lot of those characteristics were balanced by sort of the bad sides of those — she was stubborn, overly cautious, unreasonable, protective, afraid.  And not without cause…but it was doing her harm.  And we got to see her slowly come to that realization and grow, which was satisfying.  So I enjoyed her, but I held myself back from her at times too…that’s probably the only reason this is 4 and not 4.5 stars.

Was Brett a bit too good to be true?  Yeah.  Do I care?  Not really.  He was down to earth, fun, caring, thoughtful…and pretty funny (the house thing was hilarious to me for some reason).  He pushed just enough to shake Cath up, but never stepped over boundaries.  I genuinely felt like he enjoyed Brenna too.

And I truly believed the connection between them.  Yeah, it was forged over crazy circumstances, but you could see them crushing on one another, and then expanding on that crush by getting to know each other.  Great chemistry.

Some very interesting secondary characters too, and wow did they run the gamut.  Quite a few very flawed ones, but balanced with other fun ones (or they themselves were balanced).

Honestly, I think I was expecting more angst since it was Ms. Tucker, but this was like Angst Lite.  A little bit humming in the background, but a lot of just fun and happy romance.  It fits what I like to read a lot more!