Desperately Seeking Sully by Jennifer Drew (HD 106)

Maggie Sanders works for a small, family owned publishing company and is the author of 4 Extreme Adventure guides under the pen name M.S. Stevens - only she's convinced she's jinxed when it comes to travel and therefore hasn't done anything described in the guides, her only experience even with camping being one time at a Girl Scouts camp when she was a kid.  So now that her boss is trying to sell the company so he can retire in peace and the prospective new owner wants to send M.S. Stevens out on a book tour, they need to hire a stand in author and fast!  While Maggie is holding auditions of mainly local drama students, Mac Sully shows up with a package from her mom's friend.  Mac is a real live adventure tour guide, guiding white water rafters, etc., who is back in town ish to build a cabin up on a mountain near his grandma so she doesn't have to move to a retirement colony in Florida.

Mac just wants to be on his way, only the prospective buyer shows up and assumes Mac is M.S.!  So now Maggie needs to convince him to sign on to pretend to be the author - it shouldn't be too hard, their compensation package is very generous, but Mac is skeptical.  Finally Maggie manages to get ahold of Mac's grandmother who invites her for dinner, and Mac agrees to sign the contract if she'll camp out with him where he's planning to build his cabin - he considers it his duty to see that she experiences some of what she writes about - and if she'll come on the tour with him, considering he hasn't even read the books.  But what will happen with all that togetherness?  Well of course they get adjoining rooms at one point and can't resist each other, but how can they have a future with Mac's need for adventure being in direct opposition to Maggie's aversion to travel?

Unfortunately I didn't really enjoy this one too much - there was a lot of (over)emphasis on Maggie's travel jinx, the concept of which was apparently based on a very few unfortunate incidents when Maggie was a kid, plus the co-opting of minor inconveniences as an adult, such as while on a trip she misses her exit on the highway and has to get directions!  Heavens, no!  The only good thing about that is that it's relatively easy to overcome the conflict - and indeed they do that pretty easily when Maggie is emotionally blackmailed onto a whitewater rafting trip with Mac and enjoys it.  Another quibble for me comes when Maggie begs out of a tour appearance with a sprained ankle and Mac realizes "Would Maggie lie to him? He didn't know her well enough to be sure" - but he thinks about it for a day or so and decides to propose.  Suuuure.  Anyway, that's it - a pretty average read.