Woman is hurt by man, pregnant by him, leaves to start a new life with child someplace else, devotes her entire world to her child’s happiness and has locked her heart away, never to trust to love again. Builds a business from the ground up and 10 years later she hires a dude that was into the wrong stuff and he gets killed. His twin brother comes to town to collect his body and find answers to what happened, gets involved with woman while investigating and we’re off to the races.

This book was originally published in the ’80s and it shows. I love Nora Roberts, and this story is pretty solid except for how quickly Jonas forces himself on Liz. He’s pushing her into doors and corners and walls and kissing her within like 24 hours of meeting her, which to my year 2020 dark timeline mind felt…bad. She’s attacked by the murderer because they think she knows where all the missing money is, and Jonas immediately demands to follow her everywhere to protect her. It’s 100% a product of its time so I tried to read around that, which was difficult for a romance novel. The cringey stuff was at the beginning when they weren’t *finger quotes*in love*finger quotes* but once she’s into him it felt a little better but not a lot.

The murder mystery was really cool. I’ve always loved Roberts’ stories around the sexy times. I chose this one to read because Roberts is familiar and a regular go to for me and I needed a comfort read, plus it was already on my Kindle. In the future, though, I think I’m going to need to seek out recent Roberts to avoid the cringe in the overly forceful contact. I mean, if I’m going to read a romance I might as well enjoy the intimate scenes too, and this one just didn’t hit those notes for me. Overall I think I would recommend that you skip this one and find something she’s published maybe after 2010.