Jake McCoy wanted to be in a branch of law enforcement where he’d find simplicity, predictability, and no morally ambiguous choices. So he became an agent with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Make sense to you? Me neither. That’s just one of the details that don’t add up in Tori Carrington’s latest novel.

Jake doesn’t believe in small talk, doesn’t approve of displays of emotion, and doesn’t like women who wear provocative clothing. Then he meets Michelle Lambert, a French woman who is – you guessed it – sexy, chatty, and emotional. She’s also in trouble. She’s been in America for six weeks on a tourist visa, searching for her daughter Lili, who was kidnapped by her American father. Michelle’s visa is about to expire, and the INS doesn’t want to renew it. Michelle has declared that she has no intention of leaving the country without Lili, visa or no visa, and now she’s being tracked by an INS agent named Edgar Mollens.

Jake finds Michelle physically irresistible and is touched by her plight, and he finds himself helping her even though he knows he shouldn’t. They conclude, while on the run, that only way to get Mollens off their backs is to marry.

When Mollens eventually catches up to Jake and Michelle, the circumstances are such that there is no reason he should not have promptly arrested them both. I don’t know much about the inner workings of the INS, but I am quite sure that they frown on illegal aliens who engage in shenanigans like these. Moreover, Jake would have a very hard time keeping his job after obviously aiding and abetting Michelle once her visa expired. Later Jake will muse that it’s not a problem because he isn’t the agent assigned to Michelle’s case. Now tell me, does that make sense?

And for that matter, why didn’t the authorities do anything about Lili’s kidnapping? It is not legal for a man to grab a child and transport her to a foreign nation, even if he is her biological father. Michelle could have had the entire French nation screaming for American blood. There’s also a complication involving Michelle’s criminal past, which explains why the INS is so anxious to heave her out of the country. That “past” is about as criminal as mine. I can’t imagine that the INS would make a fuss over it. This is just one more unconvincing fact in a plot that seems to be nothing but a string of unconvincing facts.

What saves this mess are the original and interesting characters and their highly engaging chemistry. I liked these people, and while they fell in love really fast, Carrington made me believe in them. I especially liked Michelle, who is not your usual contemporary heroine: you know, the one who had sex with one man before she met the hero, and he didn’t do anything for her. Michelle is not promiscuous, but neither is she a shy ingenue. She is unashamed of her sexuality and unembarrassed about her experience. Jake never condemns her for it, and she never makes one of those “if only I had saved myself for you” speeches. Thank you for that, Ms. Carrington.

Jake is a guy who follows the rules and doesn’t do anything without considering it carefully first. This makes the way he falls hard for Michelle quite entertaining and succeeds in lending tension and drama to the relationship. He and Michelle feel immediate, intense sexual desire for each other, and their love scenes are quite hot.

I like character-driven romances. In this one, the characters do all the driving, and the plot gets left behind in the dust. If you’re a stickler for accurate storytelling, you probably want to pass this one by. But if you want to read a book with lots of sexy chemistry and two characters who are wonderful together, you might like this in spite of the plot holes.