This is a Quickie Review. For the full review, please visit The Romanceaholic.

Expected Release Date: Available Now!
Publisher: Penguin
Imprint: Jove
Author’s Website: http://www.jodithomas.com/
My Source for This Book: Amazon.com
Part of a Series: Yes, Book 2, Texas Brothers/McLain Series
Series Best Read in Order: Works well as a standalone.
Steam Level: Steamy

There’s one classic romance standby that I admit is a guilty pleasure of mine: the abused heroine. While I know it’s not everyone’s cuppa tea, I’ve always been drawn towards these types of stories because I love to see someone who’s been horribly abused overcome the past and find love and happiness without living in fear.

Allie wasn’t just abused, she was brutalized. Kidnapped at a young age by “savages”, she was literally raised to believe that she was worthless. She manages to escape the tribe and live on her own for several years, but when she’s “rescued” by Rangers who turn her over to a corrupt preacher, her life literally becomes a living hell. Beaten, raped, and kept in a cage to be trotted out before the masses and humiliated by the preacher who was supposed to be her salvation, Allie has absolutely no memory of human kindness.

Wes returned home from the Civil War to discover that his fortune is gone, and his fiancée wants absolutely nothing to do with him now that he’s not the rich war hero she’d been expecting — a point driven home when she has her bodyguards beat him senseless and dump him in the street.

A spur of the moment decision causes Wes and Allie’s worlds to collide when he rescues her from the cage she’s been kept in and brings her to her brother’s home several towns over. In order to protect her from the preacher who is demanding her return, he quickly marries her, though vowing that he’ll let her go as soon as they find her family.

Of course, things are never that simple, but what follows is an incredibly sweet tale of finding hope where you’d only seen darkness, and finding home in the most unexpected places.

While I wasn’t a huge fan of the first novel in the series, I did enjoy seeing Adam and Nicole again and getting a bit of an update as far as they were concerned. Allie’s horrific past made her such a strong character whom I admired very much. She was terrified of her own shadow in the beginning, but that didn’t mean she was weak or cowardly; rather, she’d learned long ago to trust no one and never let anyone at your back. Wes was beautifully flawed in his own ways — he was cranky, had a talent for saying the wrong thing, and was far too obsessed with a treasure map he’d come into possession of following a cattle stampede.

Overall though, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The simple fact that Ms. Thomas didn’t gloss over Allie’s previous abuse or make light of the repercussions of having been so badly misused for so long made this one of the more satisfying HEA’s that I’ve read in a long time. 4.5/5 Stars