Heidi Hart

Start Me Up is the best of the series, in my opinion. Lori Love's tragic history makes her one of the most fully realized characters I've come across in contemporary romance in a while. She was a gifted college student, on the brink of accomplishing her dreams to travel well beyond her roots in Tumble Creek, when a debilitating accident forces her to come home to take care of her dad and his auto repair shop. Ten years later, her father has finally succumbed to his injuries, but Lori is stuck: she can't sell the business because it barely turns a profit and she can't afford the cost of environmental cleanup necessary before she could sell the land.

Lori wants sex, but not a relationship (she doesn't want to put down roots in Tumble Creek since she's still hoping to escape, though the chances of escape fade with each passing year), so she takes up Molly's brother Quinn. Quinn's agreeable to the sex-without-dating deal because he sucks at relationships (his words, not mine): he's too absorbed in his work to pay women the kind of attention that relationships require. Despite the mutually agreed upon limits, the arrangement only makes Lori feel more trapped, because Quinn makes her feel all the more keenly what she has lost. He is brilliant and educated, while she had to drop out of school. He lives a glitzy, sophisticated life, rubbing elbows with the rich and famous in Aspen, while she works in shapeless coveralls and always has grease under her nails. He has been all over Europe and travels extensively for his work, while she hasn't left Tumble Creek since her Boston University education was interrupted by her father's injury.

There aren't a lot of romance stories involving women in traditionally male jobs (at least not blue collar jobs; female lawyers and doctors aren't too hard to find), and Start Me Up was refreshingly novel in flipping some of those gender stereotypes (for example, Lori rolls her eyes because Quinn doesn't know anything about his car and bought it mostly because he likes how it looks), while also exploring some of the tensions of being a woman in a man's job (as when Lori must take precautions to protect herself when she goes out alone to answer after-hours calls for tow service). The book also explores class tensions without the stereotypes and elitist value judgments so often inherent in books dealing with class divisions: Lori is blue collar, but she isn't trashy or stupid or crude; Quinn is comfortably wealthy, but not stuck up. At home in blue jeans drinking beer from the bottle, Quinn is just as comfortable in Lori's dingy and dated apartment over the garage as he is in his more posh pad in Aspen (especially since all either of them really care about, in either location, is the bed.)