This RITA® Reader Challenge 2013 review was written by Phyllis. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Best Romance Novella category.

The summary:     

For Az, it's supposed to be a fun summer vacation with her family. Nothing complicated. Just a quick trip to test the waters as she prepares for a year on her own. That all changes when she rescues a drowning girl and meets Tate—the most gorgeous human boy she's ever seen.

Tate throws her heart, her plans, and her life into upheaval, but the closer she gets to him, the harder it is to hide the secret of what she is. With no hope for a future together, the last thing that can ever happen . . . is love.

And here is Phyllis' review:

This novella is quite good and really builds up to something-is-about-to-happen and then…. Nada.

I’m a huge fan of were-this and that-shifter, so this was right up my alley. Azure, the were-waterdragon (sorry: draki) heroine, is really compelling with a strong voice. She’s been kept safe for most of her life, since there are humans who are out to get the dragons, but now she’s easing her way into the human world by spending a summer month with her parents by a lake.

She promises her parents she won’t go swimming without them, but immediately does anyway (I would have liked to have had her feel at least a bit guilty about that. Sure, she’s a teenager, but she knows the dangers) and while she’s scaly and swimming around the bottom of the pond with her gills flapping, some local teens show up at their private swimming hole. She saves one girl who hits her head while diving in and only barely manages to act like she’s just a normal person as she meets the hot guy, Tate.
And that’s kind of it. There’s a slutty girl who’s trying to win back Tate. There’s a bad guy football jock who grabs at Az a few times. But basically, after a great deal of hesitation on Az’s part and an attempt to go home way too soon, they date. The epilogue shows that they dated for the whole month and a year later, she’s going to travel to join the boy at a beach in California.

I wondered if this was a lead-up to the next full-length novel in the series or what, since the boy never found out she was a dragon. Apparently, it’s not. I can understand that they’re high-schoolers and therefore not necessarily ready to pick THE ONE for life, but there wasn’t much depth there.

But I read the teaser chapter for the first novel, Firelight ( A | BN | K | S | ARe | iB ), and am going to snap that one up.

---

 This book is available from Goodreads | Amazon | BN | Kobo | iBooks | All Romance eBooks.