Four years ago Emma Kingston and Lenny Banks were both cops. One night, while chasing a suspicious character, Lenny was badly wounded and Emma, as the rookie, felt responsible, so she quit the force and took off without a word to family or friends to start a new life in L.A. But four years has not been enough time to forget her intense crush on her former partner and how much she wants to sleep with him although he never returned her feelings. They now find themselves working for the same employer; Lenny at the main night club in Melbourne, Australia and Emma at the newest club in L.A. Knowing she will soon see Lenny again, Emma concocts a plot of revenge to make him fall in love with her just so she can walk away and give him a taste of his own medicine.

Catch Me If You Can by Aussie author Rose Middleton is an engrossing story full of convoluted emotions, sometimes hard to fathom intentions and lots of crossed signals. Despite the distracting typos and inaccurate Southern California place names in the first couple of chapters, I was nonetheless slowly drawn into the story of these unlikely lovers. At first I didn’t care much for our heroine, Emma. She initially comes across as almost vindictive, professing a long lived crush on sexy ex-partner Lenny, yet wanting to make him suffer since he always treated her more like a little sister than a hot and desirable co-worker. Lenny doesn’t fit the typical alpha male stereotype, despite his claim of having slept with ‘hundreds of women’. Although he is a professed ‘love em and leave em’ type, thanks to a terrible loss from his childhood, he actually comes across as an honorable, gentle man who lives by a strong moral code of no sleeping with colleagues or wives of friends.

As the story progresses and Emma slowly manages to change Lenny’s mind about having a no strings attached hot fling, they both have trouble grappling with the growing feelings the fling evokes. Yet Ms. Middleton pulls off the proverbial miracle because by the end of the story, I felt quite sympathetic to Emma and saw that the end indeed justifies the means.