Winter “Winnie” Snow is alone for the Christmas holiday.  With her lively roommate out of the country for two weeks, she’s feeling less than enthusiastic about this holiday and as always, she’s volunteered to work, going to her job cleaning up a mall after hours.

Will Holliday is a fireman whose crew has stopped by the mall to set up the holiday display.  Down a sexy elf thanks to a broken leg, Will asks Winnie to fill in at a holiday charity fundraiser for new equipment.  Even though she doesn’t know this guy… well, he’s really cute, so she says yes, both to the elf gig and a potential date. Will Winnie and Will’s passion burn out, or is it an eternal flame?

Melting Snow is very much about a whirlwind romance (don’t be fooled by the official page count – the story is only forty pages long), and Ms. Gonzales doesn’t linger long to develop much between Will and Winnie.  The main goal is to get these two boinking before the end of the book, and in that aspect, if in little else, the author does succeed.

Winnie and Will do at least pause for a second to say ‘wait, this is moving way too fast!’  The rest of the book is, frankly, preposterous and has a level of skeeviness to it that made me feel oily.  Single, streetwise women do not automatically trust handsome men just because they’re handsome and tall and may or may not be a fireman.  In any other novel, Winnie would be the victim of a serial killer.  In this one, she gets to bang a Captain America clone.  They meet-cute and immediately plan a future with one another after sharing some sob stories about their pasts.

Sex in this book is dealt with in a creepy manner, from Winnie’s roommate buying her a dildo and wrapping it in Jesus-covered wrapping paper (Winnie’s an atheist, so it’s supposed to be a form of a joke) that later surfaces in a sex scene. To quote our hero, who wants to have anal with the heroine in the worst way and gets childishly jealous when she speaks to other men, “this is as close as you’re ever going to get to double penetration”; to Will eye-humping Winnie from a distance and speculating on her dress size before even introducing himself (in his estimation?  She’s a sixteen).  There’s very, very little that’s romantic about this scenario, and even though they’re together by the end of the book I can’t imagine how long the relationship will last after the newness of sex with each other wears off.

The book also falls into the ‘Winnie isn’t like other girls’ trap; a blonde, buxom stalker-type briefly serves as an example of the kind of woman Will doesn’t like; compared to Winnie’s curvaceousness, she naturally can’t compete.  Also Winnie and her roommate fondly call one another ‘bitch’ for unexplained reasons.

Melting Snow is – in a word – crass.  If it had been longer it might have perhaps been more interesting, but as is it’s not much of a grower or a show-er.

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