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TBR Wednesday: Fire under Heaven by Cinda Richards
 | Fire under Heaven Cinda Richards (Cheryl Reavis) Romance novel Second Chance at Love #382 1987 Rating: B |
Fire under Heaven is a truly fitting last entry for the 2008 TBR Challenge. I have had this book in my TBR pile forever. Years. At some unpinpointable time I went on a massive Cheryl Reavis glom and picked up gobs of her books, contemp and historical, and this was one of them. I suppose it remained there so long because I doubted the quality of the writing under this her first author incarnation. I needn't have worried.
This old category romance is only 180 pages, but there's a lot packed in there. Annemarie Worth is in the Middle East at the request of her brother whose wife has recently died. He asked her to come and escort his daughters back to the states so they will be out of danger. While there she has another small errand - to deliver a box of cookies to a soldier - that brings her into the path of David Gannon who takes an immediate interest in her. He takes her out and shows her the non-touristy parts of the area, and Annemarie is fascinated both with the sights and with David - until they are both kidnapped by extremists with a hatred for America. Then she is just terrified.
What follows is the details of their captivity and survival, escape and its aftermath.
Almost exactly the first half is in Kharan, and the second is set in Annemarie's Blue Ridge Mountain home. Annemarie has a great love for the country life she's always known; her inability to adapt brought about the end of her first marriage. So she considers a relationship with David, even after all they've been through, to be an impossibility. She knows what she needs to stay sane - her roots. And David, being military, is unlikely to be in any place for long. But the bond forged between Annemarie and David in captivity is strong. When David seeks her out after their captivity ends and she returns home, the passion between them ignites, and Annemarie has some hard choices to make.
Reavis did a great job showing how much emotion these two have for each other. That and the back country Southern setting reminded me a great deal of Deborah Smith's we-belong-together, we-were-born-to-be-with-each-other romances. The love scenes are subtle, but the emotion is not. David is really a good guy, very capable, but I liked that Reavis made him vulnerable and human. He is military, but he's not a magic working Navy SEAL. Annemarie was a little more frustrating, but her confusion and intrasigence can be at least partially explained by her kidnapping ordeal. I had to cut her some slack - PTSD can be pretty debilitating and affect rationality.
Fire under Heaven is a short but powerful category romance, and well worth reading if you come across a copy.