Tome Thursday: To The Edge

Hello everyone!

This week, I'm doing a slightly different book from a lot of others you can find on my reading list, but then again you COULD potentially find more of this genre around here if you looked very closely.

After all, bodyguards with haunted pasts that come out of the military service? Can we all say yes, please?

I mean, come on. That's probably the most cliché thing that's ever been invented and written about, but the thing is, people, okay, WOMEN, tend to gobble this up like it's something completely and utterly delicious.

Which is often true, of course.

So when one of my best friends suggested this particular author, Cindy Gerard, because of the fact that her books have all these bodyguard storylines, I have to admit that I was hooked on the description and ran to find the copy of To the Edge, which is the first of this series.

After all, as I keep telling my mother whose tendency it is to buy books in the middle of a series, you have to start at the beginning.

So, let us proceed.

The story is this: Jillian Kincaid, daughter of an incredibly wealthy businessman who grew up surrounded by boyguards and unable to make any move on her own, is now a successful anchorwoman at the news station and she is unwilling to bend on matters of personal security even though she's been getting death threats.

Because, y'all, death threats are something to ignore.

Not.

Anyway, this all stops one night when a man pops up in her apartment and scares her pretty much to death before revealing that his name is Nolan Garrett and he has been hired by her father to protect her, unless of course she wants to go to her dad's ultra-secure mansion.

Jillian is furious with everyone and the world because, you know, independent female and all that, but Nolan is harder to shake than superglue, so he's staying put.

Their relationship definitely starts off on rocky grounds since, as is usual in these cases, Jillian is going to adamantly try to live a normal life without making any concessions at all about potentialy dying, while Nolan is going to make damn sure that she lives because he won't take no for an answer.

Things seem to be all over the place until the first instance when Jillian finds a dead bird in her purse, telling her that whoever wants her dead could have easily done so, but prefers this psychological warfare.

Nolan is furious with himself but molified that Jillian is now willing to at least listen to him a bit better about protection and about what he wants to do to try and ensure her safety.

Oh, and they go rescue a buddy of his from the Special Ops group, who conveniently lands himself in trouble and needs Nolan to come crack some heads and get him the hell out of there. Jillian can only stare at a world so far removed from what she's used to that it feels like she might have landed on a different planet entirely.

And Nolan has his own vices, too, feeling guilty over the death of a very good friend, not to mention the fact that he and only a few others were the survivors of a very bad altercation during his last mission.

Of course, the survivors and his buddies don't think it's HIS fault, only the hero thinks that. It's the reason why he's the tortured hero, after all.

Things escalate as someone breaks into Jillian's apartment and Nolan needs to disappear with her for a bit to ensure that she doesnt actually get offed during this job.

This is also the part where the sexual tension between the two is cranked quite a bit higher than before, but nothing actually happens aside from some very hot salsa dancing, but then again of course the guy can dance. He's pretty much the hero who can do it all, right? Right.

Jillian is starting to figure Nolan out, and Nolan is trying to get the hell out of Dodge while he still can, but the stalker is nowhere to be found, aside from more dead animals left for her to find.

That is, until they actually catch a man.

He's one of Jillian's 'jobs' so to speak, since she'd been interviewing him to try and get his story out there. He's an amnesiac who had no documents on him or anything, and so they literally know nothing about him, and apparently, he was obsessed with her and angry that she kept poking him for information he didn't have.

Sounds legit. But not if you're Nolan Garrett. 

Something seems off to him and it definitely gets worse when he tries calling Jillian and gets nothing.

Racing to the apartment, he's just in time to prevent Jillian's boss, a very crazy lady, from killing her. Yikes!

Turns out, Jillian's father had an affair, one that her mother knew about, but the other woman thought he'd abandoned them to an abusive mother and wanted revenge on Jillian in retaliation. Isn't that something you didn't see coming?

The book ends with Nolan taking off after the job to set his head on straight, but Jillian comes to him on the boat where he previously lived, and the two of them finally settle their differences, agreeing to give this relationship thing a shot.

Fin!

I have to say I enjoyed the pacing in the book and the writing style quite a lot. Nolan, I was very happy with. His progress throughout the book showed that he was actually making steps as a character and evolving from how we see him in the beginning to the man he is at the end playing games with his siblings.

Jillian, on the other hand ...

Don't get me wrong. I love a strong female lead as much as anyone. In fact, I hinged my entire fanfiction series on that kind of character. But Jillian is one of those women who think they're always right, no matter that they have no experience in, say, making sure they don't get killed. Half the time Nolan dealt with her I wanted to slap her; if he told her to stay put, she went, if he said come with him, she dug her heels in. I am firmly convinced that, if there was a sniper taking a shot at her, and Nolan said duck, the stupid bimbo would have jumped up and waved at the sniper to prove something!

There's no other way of saying this, but she annoyed me to pieces.

Luckily, Nolan was the main reason I finished this book. Otherwise I might have tossed it into a corner without even bothering to cross that last line!

xx

*image not mine