Love By Design

“You told me the perfect bridge—the strongest and most aesthetically pleasing of them—is not just a way to span a distance. It is a physical expression of the balance between tension and compression.”
As Bond would say, Elizabeth Everett’s finale to the Secret Scientists of London series is the perfect vodka martini. Shaken not stirred. Imbued with the perfect balance of tart and sweet and pepper on the roof of your mouth. The heroine is a woman who walks a delicate line between carving out the intellectual niche she needs and claiming the joy her heart craves. It’s not that Maggie doesn’t love George. Their love was undeniable during one perfect season of contentment and dreams and planning. But that innocent love was a bubble. When it dissolved like the fleeting effervescence it was, she packed up her belongings and her heart. The hero is a true golden retriever. His loyalty and true heart have only ever belonged to one woman. Since they were children and executed intricate pranks that confounded everyone around them with their complexity, they have been two halves of a whole. George knows that for him there will only ever be Maggie. That she is his alpha and omega and all the letters in between. His love isn’t relentless - it’s inexorable. I know before I even crack the spine that this author’s books will saturate me with their wry humor, their flawless eloquence of prose, and their realistic, sometimes brutal exposure of human weakness.George and Maggie’s love story is a frank examination of social construct, gender neutrality and personal autonomy. It weaves these elements together in an uncanny parallel to the themes of oppression so prevalent in today’s newsreels and shows the reader that we can choose to rise above the conditioning we receive. Margaret wants to be an engineer. George wants to make a difference. Their love story began with a bridge and now they must learn to build one together. They must ford the distance and distrust and betrayal that lies between them. Their journey to find each other means George must find his confidence and Maggie must embrace her vulnerability. Neither of these battles will be paved with rainbows and butterflies. Both of these tattered souls have learned to believe what they have been told: George is pretty to look at, the epitome of his moniker as The Untamed Earl; Maggie’s success depends on her appearance of impermeability and paddling her canoe over the edge of the waterfall by herself. When their walls come tumbling down it is a splendid, chaotic mess. Exactly what love is supposed to be. George: Virgin, Golden Retriever, Cinnamon Roll Hero who must be protected at all costs.Maggie: Prickly, Persistent, STEMinistHeroine with an easily shattered heart of glass who needs a soft place to land.TROPES: Grumpy vs. Sunshine; Friends to Lovers; Second Chance RomanceSome of my favorite quotes:Surreptitiously rubbing the ache where she’d punched him, he took a rock. The linnet’s song and the plunk of stones falling into the water filled the silence between them that day as Georgie Willis fell irrevocably in love with Maggie Strong.There are moments in life when the world shifts as though a door has opened somewhere out of sight. Whether a person runs toward that opened door or not depends on how fast they’re stuck in place.Thirteen years, a marriage, a career, and home had come between them, yet Margaret still knew where he stood in any room she entered and could taste the salt of his warm skin on the tip of her tongue. Her body didn’t understand what Grantham had done; her traitorous heart raced in her chest fueled by memories and the scent of him that somehow reached her from across the room.Like most men, Grantham preferred to pretend he was never in the wrong, but he’d been cursed with a conscience.When women were offered positions of real power, they always came with a price. Either they had to sacrifice their dreams of motherhood, or they had to sublimate their attractiveness, or some other measure of blood was extracted.“That night on my way to fetch you, I crossed over your bridge. You called it a negotiation with gravity. What goes up will always be struggling not to fall back down.”“Know that friendship goes both ways. If you but ask, I will give you everything you want and in return . . .” Grantham stepped away. As he brushed the plaster from his knuckles, he drank in the sight of Margaret’s pulse fluttering wildly at the base of her throat, her unfocused eyes and parted lips. “In return,” he said, “all I ask is that you let me in.”At the sound of sunlight flung from his throat, the earth shifted beneath her. Not literally, of course. Metaphorically, the world moved like an earthquake and the lovely construction she’d erected around her heart cracked. How could it not?