I read Perfection last weekend while I was in a less-than-happy state of mind. I was still in my “obsessively hunting down news stories about Hurricane Katrina” stage, and by Sunday afternoon, I realized that:

a) Yelling “you goddamn useless cocksucking cuntweasel!” at my computer monitor made my cats nervous and irritated my husband, because he sometimes thought it was directed at him; and

b) I needed to chill the fuck out and read something happy and funny and sexy.

The two books I was working on at the time, Musashi and Countdown, were not exactly happy-giggle-fun-time reads, y’know? And shit, since I was on my computer already and the force of inertia had me firmly in its grip (the mystery of how I put on 10 lbs. in just the last year is now solved, folks!), I decided to check out Perfection. I stalk the author’s blog; I reckoned it was high time for me to read something she’d actually published.

So I know Kate a.k.a. Summer will probably get hives from me saying this, but: man, what a charming, amiable story. The characters! They are nice, and not in a pussy-ass, whiny “Girls don’t like me because I’m too nice, wahhhhh” kind of a way, but in a genuinely-nice-people-you-wouldn’t-mind-hanging-out-with way.

Brian Hartigan is a man with a problem: after a lab experiment went wrong, his sweat exudes pheromones that make him completely irresistible to women. It’s lots of fun at first, since he got to bang a buncha hot chicks, but the charms palled after a woman tried to kidnap him while another tried to tie him down so he couldn’t escape, not to mention all the fights he was getting into because formerly faithful (and not-so-faithful-to-begin-with) girlfriends and wives started dry humping him in public.

There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, though: one of the scientists tells him that if he has sex with the perfect woman, his sweat will no longer have the ability to turn 76-year-old women into raving nymphos. So Brian goes on the run, ducking and dodging The Man and desperately hoping he’ll find the perfect woman soon, ‘cause hot damn, he’s tired of being assaulted.

Allie Hamden is a waitress at a truck stop diner, and like just about every romance heroine, she’s had bad luck with men. She no longer trusts her instincts. So when a tired-looking man stops in the diner for some coffee and eggs and all her nubbins perk up in interest, she’s pissed off and determined to resist his charms.

She fails, of course. Hot nookie follows. Then they run. Then they nook some more. Nook, nook, nook. Run some more. Nook. Revelations happen. Nook. Oh, hey, HEA!

To say that this story happens fast would be an understatement. It’s barely over 100 pages long, and takes place over the space of a couple days. It’s really hard to pull off a convincing love story in such a short span of time, unless the characters had prior history with each other. The cynical little bitch in me was all “Are you shitting me? No way are these two going to last.”

But the starry-eyed dreamer was all, “Awwww, they’re so cute together! And they’re so nice! And look, you can totally tell they like each other, not just hot for each other’s twiddly bits!”

For once, the starry-eyed dreamer won.

Other than that, the only other complaint I had about the book was too much internal musing on the part of the hero. He ponders on and on and onnnnn about whether or not he should shag Allie stupid, about his situation, and yeahyeahyeahyeah just PULL HER DAMN PANTIES DOWN ALREADY. Too much internal musing is a problem most romance novels suffer from, however. It’s one of my pet peeves.

One other thing that niggled at me was the presence of a few really silly copyediting errors, but I wasn’t sure if the copy I got was an ARC or whether it was the finished product. So Kate, if this was an ARC, I take the niggle back. No niggle for you!

So yeah, the book was fun and sexy, and despite the warp-speed romance, I had reasonable faith in the HEA. It wasn’t perfect (har har), but it did a great job of de-stressing and distracting me from some really shitful events.