Samhain Publishing, $3.50, ISBN 1-60504-123-8
Contemporary Romance, 2008

Maddy Farrell, a forty-year-old mother of a twenty-two-year-old son, is mad at the son in question because Shawn has just announced that he couldn’t drive her to her niece’s wedding in San Francisco. It won’t be so bad if he didn’t spring his announcement on Maddy about fifteen minutes because they were supposed to leave. Never mind, Shawn has asked his friend Tonio Herrera to do the driving instead. He’s 24, packing with heat and lots of lean muscles, and seems to be treating the whole trip as a long courtship process. The kid moves fast, I tell you. By page 14 he’s already making the move on Maddy. But given that this is a really short story, I suppose it’s chop-chop time as we don’t really have much time to waste.

Since this is a short story, there is really nothing much to be said about this one. There are sex scenes, of course, for you if you like reading about older women getting the ride of their lives from young studs. There are some last-minute “But it’s love! Really!” drama late in the story to reassure me that the relationship is something that can actually last, and that’s pretty much all there is to this story.

Querida is pleasant but… well, it is what it is.