Lisa Henry - Lights and Sirens

Paramedic Hayden Kinsella is single and the life of the party. He likes driving fast and saving lives, and he doesn’t do relationships—he does hookups. Except he wouldn’t hook up with copper Matt Deakin if he were the last guy on the planet. Hayden thinks the feeling is mutual . . . until clearing the air leads to a drunken one-night stand, which leads to something neither of them was expecting: a genuine connection.
Police officer Matt Deakin moved to Townsville to take care of his elderly grandfather. In between keeping an eye on Grandad, renovating his house, and the demands of his job, he somehow finds himself in a tentative relationship with Hayden and very slowly gets to know the damaged guy beneath the happy-go-lucky persona.
But the stressors of shift work, fatigue, and constant exposure to trauma threaten to tear Hayden and Matt apart before they’ve even found their footing together. In the high-pressure lives of emergency services workers, it turns out it’s not the getting together part that’s hard, it’s the staying together.

Comment: Back in March I've read the first book in this Emergency Services duology and liked it well enough to want to read this sequel. As I assumed then, this is loosely connected to the first book and only because all characters are somehow in the emergency services. Oh yes, and Gio (from book #1) has a quick cameo that lasts for one scene.

In this book the focus is on paramedic Hayden and police officer Matt and we are told their first meet didn't go well when Matt charged Hayden with a ticket over a misunderstanding and now they are kind of enemies. Things change one day when they finally talk about that day and they end up hooking up. Since the world of emergency service workers isn't that wide, they keep running into each other and one thing leads to the other and they start dating. However, the stress of the job and the expectations of what it entails to be in a relationship might might prove too be big challenges for the guys and will they be able to try to make it work?

As I had experienced with the other book, this one was also very easy to read and appealing. I was quickly motivated to see the protagonists fall in love and even more so when the focus was not on how this had to be shown in every page but by how natural it looked as we followed them through their routines. I think I might really like the contemporary romance aspect of this author's work a lot, especially by having read other genres and them not being as seductive to me.

Hayden is definitely the major focus here, even though he shares protagonism with Matt. He is an apparent carefree guy, no worries and always with a smile but obviously this means he has to be down at some point for his constant happy persona is also a way to hide what he doesn't want others to share. It was very easy to root for him because despite his actions sometimes might be seen as ways to push others away, he is a good person and I was genuinely interested in seeing him have his HEA.

Matt is also a good hero material, he is back to Townsville to live with his grandfather, who is in need of some help and company. How not to like a guy like this, and he even wants to help around the house, fixing up some things. he seems aloof at first, but we soon learn he misunderstood Hayden when they met and after they start dating, we get to see how his personality is so laid back and appealing. His biggest flaws, I'd say, are originated on his need to control things (thankfully not in the bedroom) and how this is once or twice mentioned by Hayden.

As one can imagine, their romance is kind of slow but sweet and for a while I thought the goal was to only focus the story on this but I was quite happy to see the author also dedicates a lot of time to what it really means to be a paramedic, and a police officer in general, in the emergency service environment. It might be assumed by the public those who work in that field must be this or that but beyond a procedure to follow, they are humans who feel compassion and dislike as anyone else, and I was glad we got to have a lot of scenes with them doing their job.

I also had a better notion of some descriptions after having watched a few episodes on TV of the show Ambulance Australia. This airs on one of the cable channels I have and I think it did help me to imagine what Hayden, mostly, would go through. I particularly liked how we see that interactions with the patients, dealing with co-workers, managing protocols, then personal lives, all this adds up to the workers needing stability to process stuff and how easy it can be for them to burn out. In a way, Hayden goes through something like this and now I can feel the author did do a realistic portrayal of something likely.

Once the story line reached the climax, the protagonists had to assume their feelings and help each other dealing with the less than good experiences. This helped me to believe their situation was stable and that their relationship had a future. I still think that Hayden's past might have been used to present his issues differently and that at times it felt is was just convenient to be mentioned, but in general, I liked this book a lot.

In the end, I was happy for the guys, I was certainly very glad their HEA was believable and the epilogue was so heartwarming without being cheesy, I could really picture the scenario Hayden describes. 

I will have to investigate other titles by the author with the contemporary romance label, perhaps there are more gems to enjoy!

Grade: 8/10