Book: Until It Fades by K.A. Tucker

Published June 2017 by Atria Books|368 pages

Where I Got It: I borrowed the e-book from the library

Series: None

Genre: Adult Contemporary Romance

Twenty-four-year-old truck stop waitress and single mother Catherine Wright has simple goals: to give her five-year-old daughter a happy life and to never again be the talk of the town in Balsam, Pennsylvania: population two thousand outside of tourist season.

And then one foggy night, on a lonely road back from another failed attempt at a relationship, Catherine saves a man’s life. It isn’t until after the police have arrived that Catherine realizes exactly who it is she has saved: Brett Madden, hockey icon and media darling.

Catherine has already had her fifteen minutes of fame and the last thing she wants is to have her past dragged back into the spotlight, only this time on a national stage. So she hides her identity. It works.

For a time.

But when she finds the man she saved standing on her doorstep, desperate to thank her, all that changes. What begins as an immediate friendship quickly turns into something neither of them expected. Something that Catherine isn’t sure she can handle; something that Catherine is afraid to trust.

Because how long can an extraordinary man like Brett be interested in an ordinary woman like Catherine…before the spark fades?

I loved Until It Fades!  After reading (and loving) her Ten Tiny Breaths series years ago, I decided to give some of her other books a try.

I was really nervous to give this book a try, because I wasn’t sure if I would like it as much as her other books.  I was proven wrong, and I’m glad I was, because there was some crying by the end.

I really felt for Catherine and how hard she tried to support her daughter.  Her daughter is pretty cute, and something about her made me think of Mia from Ten Tiny Breaths.  Catherine didn’t have an easy life, and I don’t blame her for having a hard time letting Brett in.  I completely get why she wouldn’t want to be in the spotlight again, especially after everything that happened with her god-awful teacher.  It’s sad that it really changed things for her.

I loved the romance between Brett and Catherine.  It felt really natural and it didn’t feel like insta-love at all.  They are a cute couple and you could he really cared about her.  It took a long time for Catherine to admit that she had feelings for Brett but given her past romances, I completely get it.

I love that she’s pretty clueless about hockey and how the hockey loving people in her life were pretty amazed by his presence.  She didn’t realize how big he was and I liked seeing her slowly, kind of-sort of get into hockey.  I’m glad things started to go her way and that she was in a better place at the end of the book than she was at the beginning of it.

Brett was a great guy and even though we don’t see a lot of him, I still really loved what I saw.  This book is definitely more Catherine’s story and seeing her start to let others in.  I really wish we saw more of him, and part of me is hoping she’ll write another book focusing on Brett.  It looks like this one is a stand-alone but that’s not going to stop me from hoping we’ll see more of them someday.  Until then, I will probably re-read the heck out of this one.

5 stars.  I loved Until It Fades, and it’s a great romance and a great story.