Eve1972
Written on Jan 8, 2019
So I'll admit I went into this book with a little bit of trepidation. When I first started reading romance novels one of my favorite tropes was "second chance" stories. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, authors turned this trope into "the hero moves on to screw 5000 other women, while the poor broken-hearted heroine stays stuck in the past, never able to sleep with another man until the hero shows back up again".
This makes Eve very stabby (lol). So why am I mentioning all this? Because I want to give props to authors that step away from that trend, and this author did exactly that with this book. BOTH the main characters remained celibate during the three years they were separated. I'll wait while you pick yourself off the floor...(lol). Not a date. Not a kiss. Nothing...both stayed 100% true to their feelings for each other.
So deets...quite frankly, this is going to be a romance "safety" readers wet dream. Grady is utter perfection. He f-cked up big time, but he owned it, and he worked hard to make it up to Collins. His inner thoughts made my heart all squishy (lol). Collins was equally as likable. She was hurt (rightfully so) and made Grady work for it, but not for so long that it became annoying. That said, the whole "keeping it a secret" thing made me want to throat punch her a time or two (lol).
There was also a good cast of secondary characters. I assume Caleb and Emily are from a previous book? And I liked Collin's roommate Tabby. I hope she gets a book as well. I was also mildly curious about Caleb and Grady's friends, but since they are both huge manwhores, I was a little "meh" about whether I cared enough to read books with them as heroes. I am pretty over the whole OTT manwhore hero at this point.
I would say this was more of a slow burn book with no sex scenes until 75%, and there really wasn't any OW or OM drama and very little angst. Although, of course, all the nurses wanted him and threw themselves at him, because of course, they did. (rolling my eyes). Last, it was all wrapped up in a super sweet epilogue.
So yea, not much left to say. It dragged a little for me towards the end, but other than that it was a damn good romance book. And again, huge props to the author for not going the cliché route of having him be all in lurv with the heroine but continue to stick it in everything and anything. It made for a refreshing change of pace.