Nighttime Sweethearts is an unexpectedly effective little romance. With a nice fantasy feel and a touch of Beauty and the Beast, it tells a sweet story I enjoyed more than I thought I would.

This is the fifth book in Silhouette Romance’s In a Fairy Tale World… miniseries, although it’s the first I’ve read. It was easy enough to understand on its own terms. Princess Meredith Montrosa Bessart was selfish and conceited, until her fairy godmother cast a spell on her. Meredith was transformed into an old woman, and she would only turn back into her youthful, beautiful self if she managed to match up thirty couples by her 30th birthday. Now working as a manager at the La Torchiere resort off the coast of Florida, Merry has used her position to match 29 couples. With her birthday rapidly approaching, she only has one couple left.

Merry invites architect Rick Barnett to the resort to design a new wedding chapel. Rick is a gruff, solitary man. Injured in an accident on a construction site, he now wears an eye patch to cover the eye he lost, and one side of his face is heavily scarred. At first he seems too cynical for romance. Then Merry sees his reaction when he spots Cynthia Forsythe at the resort. Cynthia was his high school girlfriend, before she dumped him. From the way he reacts to her, Merry knows she’s found her final match.

Cynthia works as a personal assistant to her mother, famous author Emma Bluebell Forsythe. Her mother is a domineering figure, and Cynthia has spent her life trying to make her happy. She’s only just begun to figure out how unhappy she herself is as a result. Restless, she manages to escape from her mother and goes for a late-night swim in the ocean, leaving her bathing suit on the shore. Rick comes upon her and immediately realizes that she’s naked. Remembering how she dumped him, he wants a little revenge. He tells her he’ll turn around so she can come ashore, if she’ll close her eyes and give him a kiss. Cynthia agrees, but neither of them expects their strong reaction to the kiss.

They begin to meet nightly. Rick remains in the shadows, never letting her see his face or telling her his name. For Cynthia, it’s a chance to push the limits of her ordinary existence and feel something she never has before. With each night, she becomes more determined to learn the identity of her mystery man and draw him out into the light.

At first I found a lot to dislike about the book. The characters are fairly cliched and their prior relationship couldn’t be more hackneyed. She was the rich girl. He was the motorcycle-riding poor boy from “the wrong side of the tracks.” I’ve never heard anyone use that phrase in real life, and am fairly certain it’s only used in trite romance novel plots to describe stock characters. Her mother was a mean snob who disapproved and forced the break-up. Cynthia comes across as too old-fashioned for a modern day 26-year-old, as when the author says she puts on her “housecoat,” a term usually reserved for old ladies. An old-fashioned approach could work well for a fairy tale-type story, giving it a timeless feel, but in this case, the story just feels outdated by a few decades, which makes the occasional modern references seem out of place. It didn’t help that this sad woman with no social life finds an escape in a really cheesy-sounding romance novel, which felt too much like every unflattering stereotype of romance readers.

And yet, almost before I knew it was happening, I warmed up to the story, in spite of the often outdated sensibility. Colter paints some lovely images, and the way she captures the moonlit beach where the characters’ encounters take place nicely set the mood for romance. It really helps sustain the story’s fantasy feel. In real life I’d think a woman who considered closing her eyes and kissing somebody she knew nothing about, was not all “there.” Punching him in the nose and running as far in the opposite direction as possible seems like a much more sensible course of action. But the author manages to create the right atmosphere for the encounter where it was easy to forget the sensible thing to do and go with it.

Having the heroine fall in love with a man she never sees is a romantic concept, and it is nicely played here. The story is full of sweet moments and touching scenes as they slowly fall in love. For a short book, the author does an admirable job trying to give her characters a little depth and show them growing over the course of the story. There’s a bit more character insight than I was expecting, as both Cynthia and Rick face parts of themselves they don’t like much and try to change. As much as I disliked Cynthia early on, I appreciated that she didn’t like many of the same things about herself either and spent much of the book slowly but surely trying to become a stronger, happier person. Meanwhile, Rick, so accustomed to pushing people away because of his appearance, resists his feelings for Cynthia, even as she works her way under his skin. By the time the story reached its satisfying and very nice resolution, I’d almost forgotten my earlier reservations.

With a book this short, I usually ask myself if I knew enough about the characters to care about them and if I believed they truly fell in love by the end. While Nighttime Sweetheart certainly has its flaws, it ultimately delivers enough heart and emotion to make this simple, low-key romance work.