Normally, adultery in a romance is a deal breaker for me. It doesn’t matter if there is a lot or a little. If I get a glimpse of it I put it down since, for me, the world is ugly enough for me to let things like that bleed into my reading time. I’ve never really been disappointed with Sarah MacLean though so I gave it a go. Plus, I did want to see how she would redeem Malcolm, considering what an ass he was in “The Rogue Not Taken”. I tore through this book in about a day in a half and personally I feel that she did a fantastic job at the second chance romance.

And that is what this story is all about. Second chances. Neither Sera or Malcolm were blameless in why or how their marriage went sour. There were outside factors that helped but they both had a hand in it ending before it even began. Both made mistakes and missteps. Neither was blameless for. But they could both forgive each other and themselves and start anew.
I had no problem with the premise of her needing to find him a new wife. It wasn’t something that was plausible of course but we read romances and other fictions to escape reality and suspend belief for a bit of time. There have been fair weaker plot devices used and many that will be used in the future I’m sure. I thought it was an interesting one if nothing else especially since divorce was another one of the driving forces. Which one never plans to find in a romance novel.

It’s easy to paint Malcolm as the bad guy, especially considering how we meet him in the first book. I liked this story showed his side though. It made him more than a one-dimensional villain which is what we were shown in the first introduction to him. It also showed Sera’s mistakes as well in trapping him. It’s bittersweet because they do love each other everything just started off muddled. I enjoyed the flashbacks to how they met and started their courtship. It gave insight onto where they started from, the outside influences they had, and explained how animosity was there to begin with.

This is not a ‘typical’ romance novel in that the boy and girl already met. It’s a story about a lost love being found and mended, which is beautiful in a different way than other romance novels. Again, it’s not necessarily easy to read since there is a lot of hurt and bitterness between the two and a lot of past misdeeds that needed to be overcame. But I enjoyed this story as a beginning to the new chapter of their lives.