If you’d told me I’d enjoy a romance about a hot professional race car driver, I wouldn’t have believed you. But Flat-out Sexy is a solid, complex story about a race widow and a young driver. Kudos to McCarthy to making the world of NASCAR interesting to me.
Tamara Briggs lost her husband in a crash at Talladega, which left her with two young kids to raise. Elec Monroe is a rookie driver. He’s almost 26 and Tamara’s thirty-ish, which doesn’t stop them from having a hot hookup the first night they meet.
After a second meeting engineered by their friends, Elec talks Tamara into getting together occasionally for stress relief. Tamara thinks they can’t be anything serious, but for Elec, it soon becomes more than a fling. The fact that Tamara already has kids is not an issue for him. Due to a youthful mistake, he’s sterile, but the problem with that is he wants kids. Perhaps even more than if he could have them. Yet Elec struggles to get Tamara to consider a real relationship.
When the kids get chicken pox, Elec shows up to offer moral support and dinner and the tide begins to turn a little. Tamara finds Elec and her son lying on their stomachs fiddling with an ant farm he’d brought as a gift:
It was so normal, so masculine, so casual, that damned if she didn’t have tears in her eyes.
This was what her son had lost when Pete had spun out and hit the wall at Talladega.
I’m also happy that Tamara’s kids aren’t cutesy stereotypes—they might be young (9 and 7) and cute, but it’s her daughter who’s the race fanatic, while her son isn’t particularly interested.
It’s nice to see Tamara and Elec come to terms with their issues over the course of the book (Elec also has an ex that’s causing trouble and Tamara unsurprisingly is a little self-conscious about her body) while they learn to be there for each other.
As I mentioned, the book has a fair amount going on, but it’s not so much that it overwhelms the reader. Also, it’s definitely funny at times and there were several well-placed turns of phrase. After they met that first night, for several complicated reasons Tamara needs to sleep in her friend Ryder’s coach and ends up having to share a cab with some guy, who turns out to be Elec.
Elec, just as gorgeous as she remembered, leaned out of the cab. “Hop on in, Tamara. I’ll make sure you get home safely.
Said the spider to the fly.
I’m pretty sure this was the first romance I read, on a friend’s recommendation, and it’s what pulled me into the genre. My one complaint is that the part where they temporarily break up near the end felt contrived and manufactured. But this is occasionally true in romances. So if you already enjoy the genre, you’ll like this one if you appreciate steamy and more going on than the romance itself. And if you’ve never read one, give it a try.