Tori Ford would dearly love to stop running. Her ex is on a mission to find her, though, and she's got her little girl to protect. Maybe a horse ranch off the grid in Texas would be safe, for a little while at least… though the owner, Josh Cain, is sexy enough to pose a serious threat to her peace of mind!
Tori as a battered woman on the run was absolutely believable in her paranoia, and I'm glad the author didn't neglect the childhood trauma suffered by Ivy. Josh’s ranch was a wonderful sanctuary for them, and there were some lovely subtle parallels in the slow rehabilitation of an abused horse learning to trust humans again.
The only thing that bothered me in this book was that there were too many subplots. The terrorist plot felt as though it was shoehorned in to boost the word count; I'd far rather have had more interaction between the three leads, particularly Josh and Ivy building a relationship, which was something that was almost completely omitted. We got some of Josh’s perspective and him ‘telling’ us that feed grown find of Ivy, but there was really no interaction between them to justify that emotion, which made it hard to believe in. It would have been so easy to have Josh sheepishly bringing home a pony with some sort of feeble excuse, and then teaching Ivy to ride; watching the two of them together would have been yet another reason for Tori to fall for him.
Though I enjoyed the romance and the bits with Tori’s ex and his psychosis were very well written, the extraneous subplot at the expense of real character-building mean I can’t give this five stars. It’s well-written enough to be a solid four, though.
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book for review through NetGalley.