Ride With Me by Ruthie Knox

Ride With Me (2012)

Ruthie Knox

Grade: A

Genre: contemporary romance, road romance

Sex scenes: HOT

Source: own, eBook

Of the 135 rejections I got from NetGalley in 2012, Ride With Me is probably the one that hurt the most, and I hadn’t even cracked open a Ruthie Knox book before. I’m not sure whether I first saw it on NetGalley and it caught my eye, or Heroes and Heartbreakers did a feature on it, but either way, I previewed it on Amazon and with less than two chapters, I was HOOKED. Ten minutes into a 4000 mile bike ride from Astoria, Oregon to Yorktown, Virginia, Lexie has a flat that Tom finds with his tongue. Yes, that’s right. Unbelievably hot. Read below if you don’t believe me. Frustrated is a good word to describe how I was feeling when my request was rejected!

Cover rant: Nora Roberts

My love affair with Nora Roberts is well-known amongst regular readers and well-documented on this blog. The recent covers for her US contemporaries have been great (Bride Quartet and Inn Boonsboro) – very dreamy and romantic – and I’ve loved them. There’s been some slight changes for a few titles for the UK versions, but they’re ones that I can live with.

NR’s books are constantly being reissued and none so more than ever for Kindle with brand new spanking covers to match. I’ve generally approved (MacKades, Dream trilogy, Stars of Mithra) because they’ve been great choices. NR has been writing since 1981, so her ‘contemporaries’ thirty years ago can’t really be called as such today, but she writes with such a timelessness that it doesn’t matter; her books could be set in the seventeenth century and you might not notice. While you can probably tell with the older books that it is slightly out-of-date, there is never enough to properly pinpoint the book to a set timeframe, and so I find myself not really caring that it is twenty years old and some practices just aren’t done anymore. This is Nora Roberts for Chrissakes: she’s The Master.