Conseguir una exclusiva con el famoso autor de novelas de terror Hunter Brown fue un éxito inesperado para Lee Radcliffe, redactora de la revista Celebrity. Pero, cuando el misterioso escritor la reta a entrevistarlo durante una excursión por un paraje perdido en las montañas, Lee descubre que aquello es algo más que una simple entrevista, que él es algo más que un simple escritor de novelas de terror. Y que es al propio Hunter al que quiere... en exclusiva.

Second Nature
Lee Radcliffe was determined to meet and question Hunter Brown and work was paying for her to go to the writers conference in Flagstaff, AZ. He's an award winning writer and she can't understand how others can read whathe writes and keep going for more of his thrillers. She hopes to meet up with him there.
Hunter is there to pick her up and very attracted to her upon sight. Love the talk of the area, the nature, mountains, dessert, canyons, sun/moon sets.
There are stipulations when she wants more questions answered. he agrees if she goes camping with him.... Hot steamy sex scenes as we learn all about how and why he writes what he does. ( )

This is the first of a duo connected by heroines who work for Celebrity magazine.

Lee Radcliffe is a reporter, and she's determined to get an interview with reclusive horror author Hunter Brown. As you can tell from the names, this book was written in the 80s. Masculine name for the heroine, random noun name for the hero. Gak. Though this one's not quite as bad, since Lee can be female, though it's usually spelled differently (Li, Lea, Leigh, Leah)

Anyway. Lee discovers that Hunter will be at a writers' conference, so she dusts off the manuscript she's been fiddling with off and on, and goes undercover.

She meets him at the airport, where he'd gone to pick up his agent, who was a no-show. He offers her a ride to the hotel, and she assumes he works for the hotel. They're attracted to each other, and enjoy their conversation, so she accepts his dinner invitation, though she wonders why such an intelligent, insightful man has such a menial job.

Then she's seated in the front row at a workshop when he's introduced, and, well, you can guess she's pretty irritated. He makes it a dare, so she goes through with dinner, but she lets her anger get in the way of subtly interviewing him, the way she'd intended to. Making matters worse, she leaves her manuscript with him.

The situation hits bottom when, intrigued by the manuscript, he does some checking and discovers she's a reporter, and the rest of the conference is a bust.

Then, back at work, Lee gets an invitation from Hunter to go on a camping trip with him for two weeks, during which time she'll be allowed to interview him. The expected city-girl-on-a-camping-trip hilarity ensues.

If it weren't for Nora's deft hand with characters, I wouldn't have liked this one at all. Lee seemed awfully hypocritical for being angry with Hunter for not correcting her mistaken impression of him, while she was deliberately deceiving him. The saving grace was that she did eventually realize this. And she was a pretty good sport about the camping trip, though that's a pretty common plot--maybe less so in 1986?

I didn't mention Hunter's daughter. She was fairly age-appropriate, but mostly just a plot device to explain his reclusiveness. It was a little hard to reconcile the Great Dad™ with the man who left his daughter, first for a week-long conference, then shortly afterward for two weeks on a camping trip. Which is not to say that single parents don't deserve personal lives, or that it wasn't satisfactorily explained in the story--it's just one more example of why I don't really like children in romance novels--they tend to conveniently disappear quite a lot.

I also found it a little hard to believe that Lee's partial manuscript was So Great and impressed Hunter so much that he thinks she should quit her job and just finish it. I've been around too many aspiring authors to believe that it's quite that simple or easy.

On the other hand, the characters did come to life, and I very much enjoyed Hunter's dilemma of being so attracted to someone he was also angry with. Even better was Lee's conviction that she needed to return to her old life. The character who's caught between their safe, predictable, comfortable life, and the possibility of their heart's desire is a classic story, and Nora gives us all those emotions, and makes them very real. ( )

Reculsive writer Hunter Brown is found and makes an agreement with journalist and wannabe novelist Lee Radcliffe that if she survives 2 weeks camping with him he'll give her an interview. ( )