The heroine of Good Time Girl is a woman, I suspect, who reads a lot of Harlequin Romances. After twenty-nine years of being a good girl, Roxanne Archer is determined to have one wild fling, and that fling just has to involve a cowboy. On summer vacation from her teacher’s job, she heads west, gets a full makeover, and sets her sights on sexy rodeo bronc rider Tom Steele. She picks up Tom in a Texas honky-tonk and invites him back to her motel room.

The sex is the stuff dreams are made of, and Roxy offers to spend the summer with Tom – driving from rodeo to rodeo, cheering him on, and spending every moment possible in his bed. Tom has plans for the future – marriage, settling down – and he knows his rodeo days are almost over. He can’t believe he could get so lucky as to meet a good-time girl looking for a fling, and he readily agrees to Roxy’s proposition of a no-strings-attached summer affair.

Harlequin’s Blaze line focuses on sexual explicitness. From what I’ve heard on message boards and elsewhere, many readers have found that Blaze authors are focusing so much on the sex that they’re leaving out the likable characters and comprehensible plots. That’s not true here; the great thing about Good Time Girl is the way the sizzling, relatively anonymous sex of the first chapters slowly gives way to tender lovemaking as Roxanne and Tom fall in love.

There’s a lot more to Roxy than her good-time-girl façade. She’s the product of a cool, wealthy east-coast lifestyle, teaches Latin at a private prep school, and longs for passion in her life. I found her need to let it all hang out convincing (it helps that she was not, thank God, a virgin before she met Tom). There’s also a lot more to Tom than his cowboy image, although it takes Roxy a while to look beyond her own fantasy of the wild west to realize that. This is a story of two people learning to look beyond their initial expectations, and getting to know each other below the surface.

If you like the promise of Harlequin Blaze but have been disappointed in the execution, you might want to give Good Time Girl a try. It’s a very sexy story, but as well it’s a romantic story, with a happy ending you can cheer for.