Review: Wild Rain

Wild Rain by Beverly Jenkins
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Spring Lee was seemingly as untamed as the Wyoming mountains, and frankly, just as impressive.

Second in the Women Who Dare series, Wild Rain, returns to the town of Paradise in the Wyoming Territory. Frequent readers of Ms. Jenkins will recognize a lot of characters and relations of former stars from previous books but I would only suggest Tempest, book three in the Old West series, as a possible book that you might want to read before this. The starring heroine here is Spring Lee, the sister of Dr. Colton Lee from Tempest but our hero Garrett McCray is a new character from out east, coming to interview Colton for his father's sundown newspaper. Spring comes upon Garrett after he is thrown from his horse and with an early spring blizzard, normally surly Spring lets Garrett stay at her cabin until his knee heals.

He’d left her feeling treasured, desired, something she’d never experienced before. It awakened a long-buried part of herself to the possibility of what could be, and that scared her.

Spring was the star of the show for me, she's fiercely and competently independent, strong willed, has some bite, and a little bit of vulnerability. When she was eighteen her grandfather threw her out of the house when she wouldn't marry the man he'd chosen for her. She ends up working on a ranch where the owner makes her trade sexual favors for the job and even “shares” her with his son. There's no flashbacks to this but the few times Spring thinks back to it, clearly shows how traumatic it was for her but how she survived and fought for the independent life she has now. Spring is one of those heroines who is deeply clear, what you see is what you get but there's an ocean to her thoughts and feelings.

Being enslaved, who he wanted to be had been beyond his grasp. Now free, his life, ambitions, and dreams were his own. He’d not turn the reins over to anyone else.

Spring was such a strong character that Garrett paled in comparison. A little farther into the book, we learn that he ran away from enslavement when he was fourteen and joined the Union Navy, read law because that was what his father wanted but ultimately became a carpenter for his own self-fulfillment. The author calls him a “cinnamon roll” hero and while he sweetly loved Spring and introduces her to foreplay and desire, he was too blankly just there for a lot of the story. There was some instant love going on too, he's ready to move out west to be with Spring already at around the 40% mark.

She’d chosen him for now, so he contented himself with holding her close and listening to the rain.

As always, Ms. Jenkins shines with her family dynamics and the second half provides that with Garrett having a heart-to-heart with his father about how he wants to live his life his way (it's a pretty emotional conversation as Garrett's father explains why he tries to control and hold so tightly to his two children) and Spring having to deal with unresolved issues with her grandfather. There's some drama with the son of the man Spring worked for, which I thought added good angst, but he brought along another character that wanted to build a saw mill and that whole storyline and its characters never felt settled in right and broke up some cohesive story structure for me. Along with emotional family dynamics, you'll always get interesting historical portions that help create a feel for the setting and characters. There's mention of sundown newspapers, the Sandy Creek Massacre, a Civil War ship battle, and the beginning of Jim Crow.

Being around Garrett McCray had altered her thinking about life and her place in it in ways that were new and challenging: from how she defined respect, to what she deserved from a man in bed. In his calm, quiet way he’d changed her, not necessarily into a better person but a different one.

With Spring and Garrett's love feeling too instant for me, I never fully felt the emotion in their bedroom scenes and those were what was left to carry the heft of their relationship in the second half. There's some ending angst with Spring not wanting children that gets resolved fairly quickly but still in a way that left me feeling their relationship was more of a happily for now instead of a happy sigh ever after. Ms. Jenkins does the old west vibe wonderfully, this couple just didn't strike any heavy emotionally chords for me.

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