Pilots intrigue me. I’m not sure why. Maybe because they are so few of them in romance novels or maybe it’s the uniform. Needless to say, a hero pilot is one of the reasons I decided to read Not Quite Perfect. That and the fact I’d read Catherine Bybee first book and enjoyed it very much.

Okay, let’s get to Mary and Glen’s romance. Glen I liked immediately. Why? To be honest it was his soft laugh when he realized Mary had memorized his phone number. A number he’d given her eight months before that she’d hadn’t used up until that moment, when her best friend Dakota went into labor. I took his laugh to mean, Caught you. You are interested in me. Cocky but not too cocky. Confident. So sexy. And his attitude, in my mind, fits the whole pilot thing.  

Mary is real. I could really connect with her. She’s super attracted to Glen but he’s player, is commitment-adverse and he lives on the east coast—on the opposite coast from her. Even if he didn’t have the first two strikes against him, the third was a deal killer, right?

Of course not, this is a romance after all. And so it begins. The birth of Dakota and Walt’s baby brings Glen to California. To Mary. And the attraction between them is still hotter than ever. The sexual tension is fantastic. I loved it. Glen is quite delicious. He teases, he flatters, he flirts and he finally asks Mary out on a date. What else can she say but yes. So she goes…and she falls.

The issue of distance becomes a make or break issue between them. When they’re together, things are great. Their chemistry is darn near explosive. When they’re apart, things get hard. Phone calls aren’t enough. The missing each other never completely goes away. The weekends they get to see each other soon aren’t enough. And what makes it worse is when Mary starts having problems with one of her clients (she’s a therapist). Then she meets someone, an attractive man who’s had it clear he’s interested. And he’s right there, living only miles away from her, not in Connecticut like Glen.

Then to make matters worse, things get squirrely and downright scary for poor Mary when her house is ransacked. I won’t say more than that but I will say that I saw the ending coming a mile away. I would have scored the book higher if I hadn’t. I also grumbled a bit about the flowers. I found it difficult to believe she didn’t say anything specifically about them to Glen whether in person or by text or phone. But that’s minor grievance because while the culprit didn’t surprise me, how it played out at the end did.

I really liked that the secondary characters were fully fleshed out. Besides Dakota and Walt, I particularly liked Mary Frances, the ex-nun who played a large part in raising Mary.

All in all, Not Quite Perfect was a great read, the characters fully formed, the pacing spot on. That it kept my interest throughout says it all. I would definitely recommend and look forward to Ms. Bybee’s next book.

~ Beverley