Fumbling for Affection is book one in The Buchanans series by Beth Gildersleeve and is a paranormal sports romance.
Maggie is the manager of a coffee shop in Cascade City, and is hoping to buy the shop, when her arch nemesis, Lucas comes back to town. Lucas is a professional (American) football player, and is not only her brother’s teammate, but also his roommate, and has been masking feelings for Maggie for years.
I’m not a big fan of sports, and as such also not a huge fan of sports romance, but this book caught my attention and I thought I would give it a try. I found that although one of the main characters was a professional football player, the story was not heavy on the sports side of things, so I really enjoyed the story. It was much more focused on the relationship between Maggie and Lucas. In fact, there was much heavier emphasis on Maggie’s business interests, than there was in Lucas’s being a professional football player.
Likewise, although Maggie is a witch, there was not a heavy emphasis on the paranormal in this book either. It was a nice balance of contemporary romance with a hint of paranormal and sports tossed into the mix.
The romance in this book is on the sweeter side, with no real steamy scenes. Much of the initial conflict between Maggie and Lucas revolves around Maggie’s misunderstanding Lucas’s motivations from their early years, but thankfully that misunderstanding is resolved well before the end of the book, and isn’t dragged out interminably.
All in all, I really enjoyed this book. I liked the characters and the setting and may look for further books in the series to see if they follow the same type of format.
Life, Tea, and Everything 