I’m going to have to agree with all of the other negative reviews of this book. The beginning was great. The rest of it? Not so much. And the problem was the heroine.
(view spoiler)[
The story opens with Melody in a hostage situation in some unnamed country where the insurgents all wear robes and sandals and have very negative opinions of women. She was an administrative assistant in the US embassy and the government has been overthrown by these dangerous rebels. They’ve taken over the embassy and Mel and two other Americans are being held hostage. They haven’t been hurt so far and Mel has disguised herself so that they don’t know she’s a woman.
Harlan “Cowboy” Jones is one of the Navy SEALs sent in to rescue the hostages. This is one of the things that bugged me throughout the story. SB couldn’t seem to settle on what she wanted the characters to call the hero. Half the time the heroine referred to him as “Cowboy”, sometimes as “Jones”, and only very occasionally as “Harlan”. It was irritating and made me fixate on the name instead of being swept up in the story. I’m just going to call him Jones for the rest of the review because it’s the shortest.
Jones is already a little taken with Mel before he goes in to rescue her, having found her photograph very appealing. Then when he sees how resourceful she was in hiding her gender, he’s impressed. They escape without incident, but then the helicopter that was supposed to pick them up is a no-show, meaning they’ll have to find another way across the border. They all split up and Mel says that she wants to go with Jones. It’s pretty obvious to everyone there that she’s developed a hero-worship crush on him. Jones and Mel go with another man named Harvard while the rest of the group heads off in other directions. This setup makes it so that there’s no chance of any hanky panky while they’re still running for their lives, which is probably the right thing and more realistic, but a little disappointing from a romance novel perspective.
They make it to an airfield and Jones goes in alone, leaving Mel and Harvard behind. He ends up killing four insurgents in a knife fight before disabling all of the planes except the one they’re going to use to escape. That all goes off without a hitch too and soon they’re landing in friendly territory. The runway is swarmed with ambulances and Red Cross workers but before they disembark, Mel asks what’s going to happen now. Will she ever see Jones again? He explains that they’ll be separated and checked by doctors and debriefed but that he’ll come to her hotel room that night. Then he kisses her senseless.
The story picks up seven months later and I felt gypped. We didn’t get to see any of the time Mel and Jones spent together on this whirlwind affair. We’re told that they spent several days together, mostly in bed, but we don’t get to experience any of it in real time. We also don’t get to see what happened when they parted ways. What were the circumstances of them saying goodbye? What were they each feeling? We’ll never know.
As soon as the story picks up again, we learn that Mel is pregnant. She hasn’t told Jones about the baby and doesn’t intend to. Jones has been missing Mel all this time. He hasn’t been with another woman since then, despite having lots of offers, because she’s the only one he wants. He’s just been transferred to Virginia, which is much closer to Mel’s hometown in Massachusetts, so he calls her up. He leaves a message saying that he’s been thinking about her a lot and even knowing that “she said what she said” when they parted, he wants to come see her for the weekend.
What did Mel say when they parted? Well, we never really find out the specifics, but basically she told him not to call or write to her. That she wanted a clean break after their affair ended. Jones was upset by this, but she felt it was for the best and stands by her decision. And this is part of why Mel ruins the book for me. She was so cold towards Jones that it made me hate her. Time and time again he put his heart out there and every time she stomped all over it.
Mel gets Jones’s message and her sister (who is awesome, btw. Very supportive and loving) is shocked to learn that Mel never told Jones about the baby. Mel then calls Jones back and leaves him a message saying that she hasn’t changed her mind. She doesn’t want to see him and to please not call again. Jones is hurt by this but decides to go see her anyway.
There’s a side story going on throughout the book about a 12-year-old boy named Andy. He’s a foster kid who’s been placed with Mel’s neighbors and he’s troubled. He tries to keep people at arms-length by being nasty and abrasive. He’s also getting picked on by some much older boys. Mel is driving through town and sees Andy being beat up so she stops and rushes over. She’s been having a very rough pregnancy filled with lots of dizziness and frequent vomiting, so running isn’t great for her. The other boys run off and Mel tries to talk to Andy. He’s resistant, as usual, but they almost make a breakthrough until Andy pulls back and runs off again. Mel tries to chase him and asks for someone to stop him, but then she faints. Jones is there on the street corner and snags Andy as he runs past. Only when he tries to march Andy back does he realize that the pregnant woman who was after him is actually Mel.
Jones is very confused and immediately suspects that the baby is his, but he’s not sure. He rushes her to the hospital and there’s lots of confusion. Jones keeps asking for the baby’s due date and Mel tries not to give it to him, but then her sister, who is a nurse at the hospital, rushes in and knows right away who Jones is, so she tells him.
When Jones takes Mel home after the hospital she basically tells him not to let the door hit him on the way out. She says straight out that she doesn’t want or need Jones, and neither will their baby. That she’s got enough money saved up to be able to stay home with the baby for four years before she’d have to go back to work (how???), and that her mother has already set up a trust fund for the baby to take care of college. So there’s nothing Jones can bring to the equation and she doesn’t want him involved.
Jones leaves after this, but comes back the next day in his dress uniform. He asks Mel to marry him, and she harshly rejects him. And that’s pretty much what happens for the rest of the book. Jones tries over and over to get Mel to agree to marry him and she tells him to get lost. He even sets up a tent in her backyard and stays there for weeks hoping for any crumbs of affection she might deign to give him. And no matter how many times she harshly rejects him, and no matter how much that hurts him, he still keeps coming back. He never gets mad at her or tries to push her faster than she’ll allow. It was brutal to read, honestly.
Mel’s objections to being with Jones are that they don’t really know each other. A sex-filled fling after an adrenaline-fueled nightmare isn’t the same as an actual relationship. They’ll be miserable together if they get married just for the baby. And that Jones will hardly be there anyway, because he’s not going to leave the SEALs and that means he’ll constantly be away on dangerous missions. Mel doesn’t want a lifetime of being alone and worried that this time he might not come back. She wants to marry a nice, normal guy.
There’s one scene where Mel has a midnight craving for food and Jones and she go to the local convenience store. Only when they get inside, Jones realizes the two guys at the counter are robbing the place, so he attacks them. In the ensuing struggle, Jones yells for Mel to get outside, away from the danger, but she just stupidly stands there frozen in fear that Jones will be hurt. Afterward he yells at her, demanding to know why she didn’t “follow orders” and get her and their baby to safety. She responds by yelling back at him that she’s not one of his soldiers, she doesn’t “follow orders.” After that she re-erects the wall between them.
Jones’s inner monolog tells us that his reaction had been born out of the absolute terror he’d felt at her being in danger. It was so bad that he’d actually had to excuse himself in the middle of giving his statement to the cops so he could go off and vomit. He, a Navy SEAL who had been in dozens of dangerous situations and never even flinched, had been scared, for her. I thought that this scene was included so that Jones could have an epiphany about what it would be like for Mel to be married to him. That the fear he’d felt at her being in danger that day would be what Mel would feel every single time he went on a mission….but it’s not. Absolutely nothing comes of this encounter, other than that Mel pulls away again. What a missed opportunity.
Jones also starts spending some time with Andy. They work out together and Jones agrees to teach Andy how to fight, under the condition that he only uses it to defend himself, not to start fights. It seems to be having a positive effect on Andy and he’s opening up. He also starts using Mel’s sister’s computer to do research and he and the sister start bonding. Then the police show up one day and say that a local house was vandalized and a witness saw Andy in the area. Andy’s fingerprints are also all over the house. Andy says he didn’t do it, but Jones doesn’t believe him, because of the fingerprints. Andy is very hurt that no one trusts him. Soon after that, Andy turns up missing and they find his clothes next to the Quarry swimming hole. It’s a place Andy and Jones had gone together a few times. Jones to keep his SEAL skills up to scratch and Andy so that he could gains some exposure to what it would be like if he went into the military. Everyone suspects Andy drown and Jones feels responsible. He calls in Harvard and together they dive into the very deep shaft, looking to recover the body.
This incident has a profound effect on Jones. He’d been fighting to marry Mel so that his child would know that he had a father who cared about him. Thinking that even a father who was away a lot would be better than none at all. But this thing with Andy makes Jones feel like he doesn’t have what it takes to be a father. Soon Mel realizes that Andy had been using the computer to look up the army base where he’s bio-dad was stationed and they think that’s where he really is. Mel and Jones race up there and find Andy at the bus station, completely dejected. He’d seen his father, but the man only spent five minutes with him and kept calling him by the wrong name. Andy then says that he doesn’t know why Jones wants to marry Mel anyway, when he’ll never be around, just like Andy’s dad. That the man Mel works for has the hots for her and would marry her in a second, then he’d actually be around for both Mel and the baby. This also hits home for Jones and he realizes that Mel and the baby probably will be better off without him.
Next day is Mel’s first Lamaze class. Her sister was going to go, but now she’s attending a meeting with social services, to try to determine Andy’s fate. The sister wants to adopt Andy. So Jones goes with Mel and she’s supposed to be relaxing against him during the session but instead she’s very tense. Mel’s thinking about how she’s now fallen in love with Jones and wants to give their relationship a try after all. But Jones sees it as another sign that he should just go. She’s been consistent in her rejection of him all along and the recent events with Andy have finally beaten him down to the point where he’s ready to give up. He tells Mel that he’s going to give her what she wants. Earlier in the book she’d offered him a “compromise” where he was allowed visitation rights, now Jones wants to accept that deal. And Mel doesn’t say anything about her recent decision that she loves him. She just agrees.
They go back to her house and have sex, which didn’t really make sense for where their relationship stands, and then Jones leaves the next day. We don’t see him leaving, but we’re told in exposition after the fact that Mel barely even said goodbye to him. That she and her sister had been rushing around cleaning the house because Social Services was coming over to inspect it as part of considering her sister’s request to adopt Andy. So Mel let the man that she supposedly loves and just had sex with, the father of her baby, just walk away with barely a “drive safe” on his way out the door. I seriously hate this woman.
Back at his base, Jones is in a bad way. He attacks one of his teammates when they make a crack about Mel. Harvard talks to Jones and basically convinces him to give things another shot. But then they’re sent out on a mission so he’s gone for weeks. In the meantime, Mel wakes up to blood all over her sheets. She’s had a partial placental abruption and is hemorrhaging. They get her to the hospital and stop the bleeding, but Mel refuses to have the baby delivered by C-section. There are still 2 weeks to go before the baby’s full term, and they’re not currently in danger, so she sees no reason to rush it. Except that if she starts hemorrhaging again, they might not be able to stop it and she might bleed to death.
Jones comes back from his mission to a stack of messages. One is from Mel, saying that she loves him, the rest are from her sister begging him to come back and convince Mel to deliver the baby. She believes that the real reason Mel is holding off is because she promised that Jones could be there for the delivery. Jones goes back and tells her to have the C-section. He also says that he still wants to marry her. He knows he’s asking a lot. She’ll have to move all over the world as he gets stationed various places, but he loves her and she loves him. Mel agrees. The epilogue is them together on a base somewhere, their son now months old and Mel tells us that there’s nowhere else she’d want to be.
It all felt very abrupt and unfounded. None of the issues Mel had been bringing up the whole book had been resolved, she just suddenly became okay with it all. Jones never considered leaving the SEALs and he really IS gone more than he’s at home. But everyone’s just fine with it now? And what was with Mel letting him leave without telling him she was in love with him? It’s not like she wanted to tell him but something held her back, or physically prevented her from doing it. She was just too busy cleaning the house?? Oh be still my heart. I’m feeling totally bowled over with Mel’s affection for Jones here…
(hide spoiler)]All in all, it just wasn’t a very satisfying read. Mel treated Jones like dirt throughout the whole book and only changed her mind at the very, very end when the magical ILYs were exchanged. Jones took so much abuse from her and just kept coming back for more. And none of their legitimate issues ever got resolved, they just magically became okay with them now. Lame
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