Overall: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Plot/Storyline: 📖📖📖📖
Feels: 🦋
Emotional Depth: 💔💔💔💔 
Sexual Tension: ⚡⚡
Romance: 💞💞💞
Sensuality: 💋💋💋 
Sex Scene Length: 🍑🍑🍑  
Steam Scale (Number of Sex Scenes): 🔥🔥🔥
Humor: A bit
Perspective: Third person perspective from both hero and heroine


Should I read in order? 
Probably – this one is okay as a stand alone, but there’s so many interwoven friends becoming family relationships in this small town that I think your enjoyment would be better following everyone’s HEAs together. 

Basic plot:
Ridge Steele is a former preacher. Accused of crimes, he must make his home among a town of outlaws but he longs for someone to share his life with. He corresponds with a prisoner, Adeline, to be his mail order bride. Upon her release, she travels to meet him.

Give this a try if you want:
- Western America setting in 1882 (Texas)
- There’s plenty of heavier themes running through this book – it is very much focused on finding love and recovery after trauma so be okay with various content warnings (There’s not too much on page, much of it is remembered/implied)
- Disability featured – heroine suffers from selective mutism
- Mail order bride trope/marriage of convenience
- Big family feel – their town has a family feel with everything coming together and helping each other, though they aren’t actually related

Ages:
- Heroine is 20, couldn’t find an age for hero (would guess late 20s?)

My thoughts:
So, I definitely don’t want to let my lower rating deter anyone from giving this a try! If you think the things above sound like something you would enjoy then definitely give it a try.

This book has a lot of themes about healing within it. So many of the characters suffer, and they find ways to cope and overcome their life traumas. There’s also a lot of things that happen on page, where the characters work together, or work with other members of the town to really bond together and fix problems.

But, for me, I just didn’t like it. There was so much going on, so so much. The romance got a little lost for me and sadly I didn’t feel much tension between the two of them. I eventually got bored, even though there was a lot of action and things happening. I wanted the book to end a few times earlier, but then a new drama would occur that they would have to overcome. It was just a lot for a person that tends to prefer those simple books based on relationship development.

I did listen to the audiobook. I’m not sure if it affected how much I would have enjoyed the book versus reading – I think it would have been similar. I can’t say I loved the narration, but I had problems with the book more than the narration.

Also was it just me, or did the man with the ‘lovely Irish accent’ in the book sound like Count Dracula? Lol

Narrator was Meghan Kelley.


Content Warnings:

- Lightening strike sets hotel on fire
- Slut, bitch used against females 
- Solitary confinement remembered
- Physical assault/attempted sexual assault
- Violence, shootouts
- Remembered deaths of various people
- Missing child (short – only about 1-2 chapters)
- Some religious abuse (heroine’s father is a zealot and abuses his family due to his beliefs)
- Cigarette usage/rolling
- Prison torture remembered
- Tornado that damages but doesn’t kill anyone
- Kidnapped and abused physically by villain (heroine’s father)
- Heroine’s mother kills heroine’s father while he ‘baptizes’ heroine

Locations of kisses/intimate scenes – all the scenes were on the lighter side – I listened to the audiobook and it’s a little harder for me to tell how long the scenes are that way

8% - kiss
25% - kiss
37% - kiss
38% - kiss
50% 🔥 - kisses, touches, breast play, fingering
53% 🔥 - sex by a lake
73% - kiss
96% 🔥 - kiss, missionary, fairly short