READ: Sex, Not Love by Vi Keeland ~ Sarah A’s Review. PDF, EPUB online free reviews.

Sex, Not Love a standalone Contemporary Romance Novel from #1 New York Times Bestselling Author Vi Keeland

My relationship with Hunter Delucia started backwards.

We met at a wedding—him sitting on the groom’s side, me sitting on the bride’s. Stealing glances at each other throughout the night, there was no denying an intense, mutual attraction.

I caught the bouquet; he caught the garter. Hunter held me tightly while we danced and suggested we explore the chemistry sparking between us. His blunt, dirty mouth should’ve turned me off. But for some crazy reason, it had the opposite effect on me.

We ended up back in my hotel room. The next morning, I headed home to New York leaving him behind in California with the wrong number.

I thought about him often, but after my last relationship, I’d sworn off of charming, cocky, gorgeous-as-sin men. A year later, Hunter and I met again at the birth of our friends’ baby. Our attraction hadn’t dulled one bit. After a whirlwind trip, he demanded a real phone number this time. So I left him with my mother’s—she could scare away any man with her talks of babies and marriage—and flew back home.

I’d thought it was funny, until the following week when he rang the bell at Mom’s house for Sunday night dinner. The crazy, gorgeous man had won over my mother and taken an eight-week assignment in my city. He proposed we spend that time screwing each other out of our systems.

Eight weeks of mind-blowing sex with no strings attached? What did I have to lose?

Nothing, I thought.

It’s just sex, not love.

But you know what they say about the best laid plans…

Natalia and Hunter’s story was much heavier than I had anticipated. The ability to weave these substantial themes into books that are otherwise light fair is one of the things I most appreciate about Vi Keeland as an author. She continually surprises me with the seamless ways she pairs the levity of the characters personalities with the weight of their pasts.

Sex, Not Love is a stand-alone novel. It is told in dual first-person POV, by Natalia and Hunter. Several of Hunter’s chapters are flashbacks.

The chemistry between Natalia and Hunter was immediate and explosive. Even though this was a slow-burn romance, there was never any question of how amazing they would be together. I don’t usually care much for the slow-build love stories, but it absolutely worked in this book. Without having all of the time these two did to figure out what they wanted and needed, they could have easily imploded. As it was they built such an amazing foundation in the time they spent fighting their connection; it made the moment they gave in to their attraction incredibly poignant.

My favorite part of Sex, Not Love were Natalia and Hunter’s backstories. Their pasts colored their thought processes and reactions so profoundly; it was wonderful to see why. I deeply appreciated how those histories were told, too. Much of Natalia’s past was known from the beginning of the story, while Hunter’s was slowly revealed throughout the novel, had they been told in any other way I don’t think it would have had the same impact.

This is where I would usually post my wishes for a book. However, I can’t think of anything I didn’t like about this book. While there were times I craved the instant gratification of them being together earlier in the book, their story wouldn’t have worked out that way. Sex, Not Love was ideally paced and precisely plotted to best fit the characters it was written about.

Vi Keeland continues to impress me with her writing. She writes interesting, flawed characters and makes them highly relatable. Never have I had a difficult time putting myself in the shoes of her characters. The way Ms. Keeland builds her stories from lighthearted romps to the reveal of the heavy underlying themes always impresses me. She far surpasses my expectations with every book I read from her.

Vi Keeland is a #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal Bestselling author. With more than a million books sold, her titles have appeared in over fifty Bestseller lists and are currently translated in fourteen languages. She lives in New York with her husband and their three children where she is living out her own happily ever after with the boy she met at age six.