Marine captain Travis McCormick was badly injured in a training accident more than a year ago. After extensive rehab he still isn't back to his old self and the time is coming when a decision will have to be made about his future with the Corps. After he reinjures his knee by pushing himself too hard his commanding officer orders him to take six weeks of R&R. He returns to his Virginia hometown where he finds his family's worries about him stifling. In order to alleviate their concerns he pretends to agree to have his old friend Tess act as his physiotherapist. However, he makes it clear to her than he neither wants or needs her professional expertise. All he wants is for her to act as his cover story with his father.
Tess has loved Travis for years but he never looked at her as anything more than a buddy. He's not the only one sees Tess as just one of the guys and she has no sexual confidence. This hasn't been a major problem for her because her love for Travis has kept her from being interested in other men. However, at 33 she's starting to worry that she's going to end up the town spinster. Tess knows that Travis really does need a physiotherapist but she also knows that he's too stubborn to accept her help, so she takes his request as an opportunity to make some changes in her life. She agrees to help him with his family if he'll teach her to be more sexually confident. Tess figures that she'll either get his attention or she'll be forced to finally move on and find another man. Either way she'll be better off than she is now.
Travis is surprised, first by his own sudden awareness of Tess' charms and then by her offer, but he's happy to help a friend. Problems start when Travis finds himself jealous of the attention that a newly-confident Tess receives from other men. Now he has to decide what he wants from his future and where Tess will fit into his life.
I think that for a friends to lovers story to work it needs to be clear why the h/h have been strictly platonic in the past and why the situation has changed. I thought that Basic Training answered the first question well enough, but not the second. When Travis first begins to have lustful thoughts about Tess he keeps thinking that she has breasts and that he never noticed them before. He wonders when she developed them. That would make sense if they were fairly young or it had been many years since they had seen each other, but they're 33 and they last saw each other a year ago. I have no idea when Tess developed breasts but I feel confident that it was before she turned 32. So why is Travis suddenly seeing them? The logical assumption would seem to be that his injuries have caused him to see his life in a new light, but that's not the case. No explanation is ever given for his new-found sexual interest in Tess, it simply exists and for me that really doesn't work . I also didn't completely believe some of the decisions that Tess makes.
The love scenes had a nice level of heat and I liked that fact that Tess had a job that you don't see much in books, but ultimately I wasn't able to buy into the transition from just friends to HEA. Since that was the point of the story this ended up being a pretty unsatisfying read.
Grade: C-
Note: I didn't realize this before I started reading, but this is the 2nd of a pair of stories and I haven't read the first book, Major Attraction. There is a subplot in Basic Training that is obviously a carry over. Because I didn't read Major Attraction that subplot was of absolutely no interest to me and was in fact a little annoying. I assume that people who read the first book would feel differently.
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