There are two things you need to know about this book: you like tortured, healing heroes who are genuinely good guys? Go find this book. O’Reilly’s mastery of the incredibly sexy, almost-three-dimensional man continues in this book.
Second, I was unfortunately predisposed to dislike it. I knew that Daniel is a widower whose wife died in the World Trade Center. And so when I read the first sentences:
Since the summer he turned eleven, Daniel O’Sullivan woke up every morning the same way. With an aching hard-on. After he was married, the first light of dawn became his favorite time. He’d roll over, impatient hands searching for his wife. After making love to her, he’d shower, shave, and together they’d take the subway to work. What more could any guy want?
But then one September morning seven years ago, bright sunlight mocking in the sky, that all exploded, along with two airliners, two buildings and two thousand, seven hundred and forty people—one of whom was his wife.
Gone.
For the next five years he rolled over to look for her, impatient hands searching blindly, and she wasn’t there. And so the hard-on stayed.
The morning wake-up call evolved, the change coming so gradually that initially he didn’t notice it. In those beginning moments of wakefulness, when his brain was more than half-unconscious, he stopped looking for his wife, impatient hands no longer reaching for someone who wasn’t there.
Gone.
Daniel was starting to forget.
...my inner monologue was as follows: Nooooo! You cannot start talking about hard-ons in reference to 9/11! Nooooo! Do not want!
Silly, silly Sarah. As I kept reading and got to know Daniel, it made perfect sense. Of course that’s the frame of reference for the hero, Harlequin Blaze or not. While the people who died in 9/11 are memorialized in so many different ways, and the families who mourn them are examined in equal number of ways, the basics aren’t usually part of that discussion. What’s the most simple response to death? Sex, of course. And in losing his wife, Daniel lost not only someone he loved, but someone he made love to, and the deep abrupt tragedy of her loss makes his sleepy, semi-unconscious reachings for his wife, Michelle, that much more painful for him.
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