A business trip with the office hottie turns into a road trip from hell. 

Adam Cortinas may be gorgeous, but he’s made it clear he can’t stand Olivia—and the feeling is one hundred percent mutual. Too bad, because in order to bring the company’s new power plant online, they’re stuck with each other for the next week. 

When their travel plans go horribly awry, Olivia finds herself stranded in the middle of nowhere with Adam, AKA the bane of her existence. 

He’s in her space and in her head. All the forced proximity is driving Olivia insane. That’s the only explanation for these FEELINGS she’s suddenly having. 

But it doesn’t change anything. They still hate each other. 

Right? 

Applied Electromagnetism is the fourth full-length novel in a series of standalone rom-coms about women in STEM fields.

Review

This is a new-to-me author and while I enjoyed some the story, my overall evaluation is just nice but not great. The hero and heroine are colleagues in a company running power plants. I was excited for the STEM heroine but in the end we didn’t get as much details of her work as I was hoping for.

The hero was a real jerk to the heroine at the beginning and for quite some time into the story. We do see him change and grow, making mistakes in the process but ultimately learning to be a better person. I appreciated his growth but it took me a while to forgive him for some of the things he said and did.

I hated that Olivia had to educate Adam on a lot of things about women and personal/workplace relationships. She had to spell out things for him and I felt some of these messages about empowerment and women'ts rights sounded heavy handed to me.

Adam's backstory and the reasons to avoid relationships rang true to me and appreciate seeing this gentler side of him. He is ambitious and competitive in his work life, highly qualified and respected, even a little feared by his colleagues and his bosses, yet he hid vulnerability in his personal relationships and some deep emotional wounds.

I'm sad to say I had a harder time relating to the heroine. We see less growth and development in her, she was pretty much perfect from the start. She was attracted to him, kept thinking of him in sexual terms, even while she hated him for treating her really badly and I had a hard time with that.

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