The Day He Kissed Her
By Juliana Stone
Publisher:
Sourcebooks Casablanca
Release Date:
April
1, 2014
Mackenzie Draper is back in Crystal Lake for the long
Memorial Day weekend to say hello to his mom and spend some time catching up
with his best buds, Jake Edwards and Cain Black, and then it’s back to New York
City, his job at the architectural firm where he’s just about to make partner,
and a free-wheeling social life that leaves him free of responsibilities. A few
days in Crystal Creek are about all he can take before the bad memories from
his childhood start taking him places he doesn’t want to go. His abusive father
may be in jail now, but that doesn’t prevent Ben Draper’s presence from being
very real in the home in which Mac grew up. But an unexpected meeting with a
curvy blonde and heated memories of a New Year’s Eve with bedroom fireworks
more explosive than any that lit up the skies leave Mac reconsidering his
friend Jake’s request to spend the summer in Crystal Creek designing houses for
an Edwards’ land development project.
Lily St. Clare has her own share of dark memories, but
Crystal Creek and the friends she has there are helping her to heal. She’s
found a measure of serenity in the small town, but serene is the last thing she
feels when the stranger from a passionate New Year’s Eve encounter turns out to
be her friend Jake’s old friend Mac. To her own surprise, Lily, who meets life
head on, can’t run away fast enough from this man who makes her feel things that
threaten her carefully controlled life. But she can’t escape the man or the
feelings, and when Mac assures her that he will be back in Crystal Creek for
the summer, Lily knows that whatever is between them is far from over.
Neither Mac nor Lily is interested in
long-term commitments, so when the heat between them makes a July afternoon
seem mild in comparison, they agree to seize the moment, accepting that forever
is not part of the plan. But soon they are spending every possible moment
together and building a shared life even if love is still a word that strikes
fear in their hearts. But Mac is a damaged soul, his childhood wounds still
festering and his anger barely contained. He and Lily have no hope for a future
when he is controlled by his past.
The third novel in Stone’s Bad Boys of Crystal Creek series is
the darkest of these emotional tales. Mac and Lily are both wounded creatures
who fiercely protect their vulnerabilities. Lily is further on her journey
toward health and wholeness than is Mac whose hatred of his father, anger mixed
with love and pity for his mother, and fear that he is a man in his father’s
image, inside and out, color every choice he makes. The redeeming power of love
is a standard theme in romance fiction, but Stone makes it more potent by
showing that a hero must believe himself worthy of love and happiness before he
can be transformed.
I fell hard for Stone’s wounded bad boys, and from the first
book, I’ve hoped to see light and love shatter Mac’s darkness. The Day He Kissed Her fulfilled my hopes,
and Lily was a perfect match for Mac. There were some loose ends left with
secondary plots. Perhaps that means readers have not seen the last of these bad
boys and the people in their lives. If you like your romance high on sizzle and
emotional twists, I suggest you check out this book. For readers like me who
prefer a lower sensuality level, these characters are sufficiently engaging to
make it worth moving outside your comfort zone.
Romance fiction ranges from sweet to scorching, and it’s not
always easy to tell where a particular book falls on the sensuality scale from
the cover and cover copy. Some people advocate a number system that gives
readers a clearer idea of what to expect. What do you think of that idea? Where would the books you read most often
fall on such a scale?
