Rating: ★★★★| 8 hours 12 mins | Tantor Audio | Sports Romance | 12/09/2013
I can’t believe how long it’s taken me to get back to this series. The Fast Track series follows the romantic lives of the men and women in the Charlotte stock car racing community. I’d started this series years ago and just never got around to finishing it.
When 32-year-old Shawn Hamby’s grandfather passes away she finds herself in one of those only-in-a-romance-novel wills where she can’t inherit full ownership of her family dirt racing track unless she’s married. With everything to lose she ropes in 25-year-old Rhett Ford–who also happens to be her best friend’s brother-in-law–to marry her for six months in exchange for part of her inheritance.
I have been reading a lot of fake marriage books lately and I kind of love it as a trope. It’s such a wacky premise, but I think in this book it’s looked at more seriously. The tension and the black moment is caused by Rhett and Shawn’s guilt of lying to everyone about why they suddenly got married. Particularly because marriage is very important in Rhett’s family. Not to say this book is all dramatic, McCarthy has a great brand of humor that had me literally loling a few times when listening to this book.
There is also a super light dusting of BDSM in this book. Shawn meets Rhett at a fetish bar she is visiting on a dare but it never goes full BDSM. It’s never fully explored or anything but it was in interesting addition to this series. There is nothing like this in the other books and I wonder if the addition of that element has to do with this book coming out around the time 50 Shades was at its prime?
I kind of go back and forth on Emily Durante as a narrator. She is from Michigan and you can hear the Midwestern in her voice. As I’ve said before her Southern accents feel more Texan than Carolinian but, her male voices are just so good.
