With its premise of former lovers reunited during a power outage, this Harlequin Blaze could have been a fun read. Instead, it was a chore for me to try to finish. I found the story unbelievable, the characters uninteresting, and I could not quite bring myself to care if the leads reconciled by the end of the story.

Larissa Zahn is attempting to make a go at owning her own romance-centric business. She currently works in a bookstore and writes a romance advice column. Her dream though is to own a store that sells items with a romantic theme like books, dvds, scented candles, etc. A childhood friend has advised her that he is opening a new hotel venture with retail shops and perhaps this would be the perfect location for her store.

When she goes to the hotel to make her sales pitch to the committee for leasing the space, she is surprised to find her ex-fiance Jason Cantrell there making a pitch of his own for his business to occupy the same space. When a fortuitous power outage leaves the former lovers stranded in the hotel, they have the opportunity to work through old and new issues with one another.

It has been my experience with the Harlequin Blaze line that sometimes the plots can stretch the bounds of what I consider believable a bit too far. In this case I never quite bought into the fact that a businessman building a high-end hotel with high-end shops would seriously consider leasing retail space to such a completely new and unproven business as a romance store, whether the owner was a childhood chum or not. Somehow I cannot picture a store that sells When Harry Met Sally dvds and chocolate-flavored body paint wedged in between Tiffany and La Perla. But perhaps I am overanalyzing.

The aspect of the story that absolutely drove me bonkers is that due to the power outage Larissa and Jason were trapped because the doors in and out of the hotel locked and could not be opened even from the inside. Surely the rich hotel owner hired better architects/security system designers than this? No? Well then, I won’t tell the local Fire Marshal if you won’t.

In all honesty I could probably have gotten past some of the more ridiculous plot elements if the leads had better chemistry or more sparkling dialogue or if the prose had been more engaging and less awkward. As it was though, I found myself rereading passages to try to understand what was being said. The following left me scratching my head: “His tongue slid fingers of her free hand into a fist, nails cutting into the skin, and tried to convince herself that jumping him was a really, really bad idea for a really long list of reasons.” After multiple reads, I still don’t understand it.

I did like and appreciate that the author created complex backgrounds for each of the characters. In addition, the characters had some very real, complex issues to work through as well. While the set-up may have been silly, the issues the characters were confronting seemed to be quite true to life.

All of that being said, this one just did not work for me. Fortunately I’ve read other Harlequin Blaze books that I enjoyed. If this had been the first one I had tried, I likely would not be trying others from this line. Here’s hoping future offerings will prove to be the fun, sexy reads that I know they can be.