Ultimate Surrender

I've completed my rearrangement of the TBR books. Auto-buy books are on top of the bookcase by my bed. Non-auto-buys are in the TBR bookcase (which is now full). True-crime and Nora Roberts TBR are on top of the TBR bookcase. I'm pretty pleased with the new arrangement, although I worry that the auto-buys will crush me if there should be an earthquake. Oh well, I will brave the danger since the result is more organized books.

I recently read Ultimate Surrender by Jill Shalvis. It's one of her Loveswepts, and it's about a woman named Kayla who falls in love with her dead sister's husband, Ryan. She and her sister, Lauren, weren't close. In fact, the sister was a selfish woman who claimed that Ryan abused her. As for Ryan, Lauren told him that she aborted his child. He doesn't know that she never had an abortion, and Kayla is raising Lauren's one-year-old baby girl, Lindsay. Talk about built-in conflict. The conflict is evident from the first chapter and continues to build.

I have to admit that I don't usually seek out books with children in them, but I ate this story right up. There's plenty of angst on Kayla's part, as she gets to know him and realizes that he's not the person Lauren made him out to be. Now she must decide how to tell Ryan the truth. She knows that she's falling in love with him, and she believes that she will lose him and Lindsay when he learns the truth. For his part, Ryan is frustrated that Kayla seems to fear him and highly attracted to her all at the same time. The story brought tears to my eyes more than once.

For whatever reason, I love these kinds of stories, where characters fall in love with people they shouldn't. There's a forbidden love element I find appealing. Some of these kinds of stories are better than others, and this one is especially good: 4.5 out of 5.

Now I just have 13 other Jill Shalvis books in my TBR . . .