Happy After All is my first read by Maisey Yates. There are a bunch of reviews for her cowboy romances here at AAR, but this one is a standalone urban contemporary.

Amelia, a romance writer, has left Hollywood and moved to a Californian desert town to run the Pink Flamingo Motel, and the initial chapters cover her first two years, during which Nathan (who writes thrillers) books in to stay for the summers. There’s attraction between him and Amelia, but barely any interaction until his third stay, when there is a major fire nearby. After the fright of the fire, Amelia opens up the motel to displaced families and in the process of all that busy-ness she gets to know Nathan. He is grumpy and closed off but very practical (he’s ex-military) and because we are in Amelia’s point of view, he’s hard to know (and hard to like). Other plot lines intersect and we see a bit more of the elderly and long-term residents of the motel, and there’s a fundraiser organised where Amelia’s ex is invited as a celebrity guest. When Amelia asks Nathan to get involved (as a buffer and fake whatever) things start to develop between them.

Both Amelia and Nathan are keeping secrets and managing grief. There are some clever nods to the romance genre, with chapter headings that define tropes and foreshadow the action in the chapter, which is very cute.

I liked the premise and I liked Amelia, but I do have some reservations. Amelia overthinks everything, and a lot of her ruminations about Nathan don’t feel justified by his behaviour: “I’m aways assuming things about him. What he feels about me or doesn’t” – even the most banal interaction produces pages of self-reflection from Amelia. Their steamy scenes are satisfying (for them) but not very intimate – “He doesn’t turn away from me. He doesn’t leave. Instead he gets up off the bed and goes into the bathroom and I hear the sound of the shower.” Ummm?

I didn’t have a sense of who the secondary characters were as individual people; they feel like comedy relief in walk-on parts. Even Nathan feels a bit nebulous as there is not much dialogue between him and Amelia until the end when he finds his voice. We read about the heat in the desert, for example, but I didn’t feel it – it’s all a bit predictable – and Nathan feels like a 1980s Harlequin hero who is a dick for the first ninety percent of the story.

Maisy Yates writes very competently, and this Happy After All is an emotional read with some lighter moments. Unfortunately, I didn’t believe in the central romance.