Heatherly Bell Books, $1.99, ISBN 979-8201596507
Contemporary Romance, 2015

In Heatherly Bell’s Anywhere With You, Kailey Robbins and pilot Joe Hannigan were once friends with benefits. 

Joe invited her to live with him for a while at his cozy small town home in Starlight Hill, and it was great. The sex was great, the companionship was just as great, and everything went swimmingly.

He eventually accepts that she means so much more to him than that, but by that point, Kailey has fled the small town because she had an unhappy childhood and she would never risk her heart to something as scary as love.

When she sees on the news that he manages to survive an airplane accident, however, she goes back there at once to see for herself that he’s okay.

If the plot seem familiar, that’s because it is!

However, this one is a cute read because the author has a knack of creating a charming, welcoming small town here without making the whole thing feel too cute or icky. Since this isn’t a long story, the author wisely keeps the number of secondary characters to just enough to add flavor and spark to the story, and while these characters want Kailey and Joe to get back together for good, they never appear too much like cult members of some weird breeding cult.

The conversations flow nicely, and the one-liners never feel out of place or mood-breaking too.

So why isn’t this one a four-oogie read? Well, the heroine’s angst is treated in an uninspired, boring manner and I actually yawn at the climactic moment when she wails that she is certain that Joe would kick her out of his place because of cooties or something. Seriously, this lady must be six flavors of mentally impaired if she could still come to that conclusion after how Joe has treated her all this while.

Because the heroine’s rather dense thought processes and antics, the romance feels more like the hero patting the head of a rather dim puppy than some intense, passionate thing. Still, while I can’t say that I’m fully into the romance, I have a pretty pleasant time reading this because of the author’s strengths as a writer.

In other words, Heatherly Bell comes off here as being too good for a story with such a silly emotional conflict!