Exercise and healthy nutrition turned out to be an all-consuming quest that kept her going. Not out of a health scare, but because she needed something to obsess over to deal with her grief. And speaking of losses, her mother’s death kicked her into losing almost 100 pounds. Those points have relevance because her mother died less than a year ago, and Merry is still having difficulty coping with the loss. Because it’s a trip that her mother always wanted to take (the Scotland part and not the three-week hike part). Merry takes herself on a three-week hike in the wilds of Scotland. They also each have a metric ton of secrets that make a remote getaway romance seem fascinating, but have devastating consequences in the real world. Unboundis a romance between two people who have gone through way too much to get to the isolated location where they meet. It turns out that Unboundis kind of in the middle between After Hours and Hard Time on the one side, and Lay It Down on the other. I knew I’d be in for a good read, so I let my fingers do the walking to Amazon. And I had a very long airplane trip in front of me. I wanted to see where it “fit” with the rest. I realized that I had read both After Hours and Hard Time (reviews here and here) but had missed Unbound.

There’s also a strong omantic suspense element that isn’t in evidence in some of her earlier work. The romance was much slower to build, and it took quite a lot of book to get there. One of the things we did in our review was compare her latest to After Hours, Hard Time and Unbound, because it was a bit different from her other books. Last week I read the latest Cara McKenna book, Lay It Down, for a joint review at The Book Pushers. But Merry craves nothing more than to help Rob surrender to his desires, and the journey draws the lovers into an entirely different kind of wilderness. The igniting passion between them rouses a secret appetite Rob has long struggled to keep hidden. And as he nurses her back to health, Rob can’t resist his guest’s sweet demeanor-or her flirtatious advances. Haunted by regrets, he avoids human contact at all costs…but when Merry turns up injured, he can’t very well run her off. Rob exiled himself to the Highlands years ago, desperate to escape his own self-destruction. A three-week hike through the Scottish Highlands was supposed to challenge her new body and refocus her priorities, but when disaster strikes, she’s forced to seek refuge in the remote home of a brooding, handsome stranger…

Feeling adrift, she strikes out in search of perspective. Merry’s lost a lot recently-first her mother, then close to a hundred pounds. She set out to find herself, and discovered the darker side of desire. Purchasing Info: Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, All Romance

Hard time by cara mckenna