Straddling the Line by Jaci Burton was pretty much just fluff. I'm not saying that to be overly critical. I'm just being factual. It was fun, light-hearted, and incredibly smutty so it had all the ingredients necessary to compel me to want to finish the story. But, at the same time I can't call this a masterpiece of contemporary romance either. 
 Straddling the Line is Trevor and Haven's story. Haven is a sports journalist dealing with the grief of losing her father. Trevor is a hot shot athlete who plays both professional baseball and football who is keeping a secret about himself. (view spoiler)[I pretty much figured out his "secret" immediately. He can't read. Well... he can a bit but he's dyslexic. (hide spoiler)] And that's kind of it... there really wasn't much of any conflict here. I'm not entirely sure if I liked that or not. On the one hand it was nice to not have to deal with the characters constantly second guessing themselves or some other ridiculous drama thrown in just for the sake of it. On the other hand without any conflict the story just turns into fluff with no real emotional depth. As the story stands we are firmly swimming in the shallow end of the emotion pool. I think I would have enjoyed getting to venture into the deep end a bit more than I got to. But I also kind of liked the absence of useless drama. It's kind of a catch 22 situation here for me. 
 Speaking of the shallow end of the emotion pool, the vast majority of the dialogue in Straddling the Line was just small talk. SOOOOO MUCH SMALL TALK. 
 It was basically like: 
 "Thank you for inviting me to the party." 
 And in response: 
 "I'm glad you came to the party." 
 And that would be pretty much where the conversation would end. And I don't get the sense that this was done on purpose because the author wanted to show a normal interaction. Almost all of the dialogue was about the same. It started to feel like these were conversations taken out of an ESL text book. I just wanted a bit more personality out of the characters because it was starting to feel pretty bland. But even with the bland dialogue, I still found Trevor and Haven to be likeable characters. I was charmed by them enough to care about them having a HEA so I kept reading. 
 Here's the deal with Straddling the Line: I wasn't really reading it for the story. I didn't expect this was going to be a masterpiece. In all honesty, I was reading this one just for the smut. I mean... have you seen the cover? I was totally counting on this being filled with smutty delights and Straddling the Line definitely came through on that one! The smut was super steamy and there was lots of it. So in that regard, the story was very successful. It just couldn't bring that same steam into the other aspects of the story like the plot and the dialogue. I'm not saying this was terrible because it wasn't. It also wasn't amazing either. It just felt kind of average for me which is ok.