Review: Story Drew Me
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 30, 2013
Gabriella Devere's mother had died when she was young, so she'd grown up as a tomboy with her father and two brothers. One night she dressed up for a town dance hoping to catch a young man's attention, but it didn't work. None of the young men ever gave her a second glance. Then, a handsome stranger looked into her eyes and seemed to know her very thoughts, and he asked her to dance. Their every move seemed synchronized, for they moved like one. Then, one horrible day five outlaws rode in and killed her family. Gabrielle vows to get revenge. She rides to a nearby town where one of the men was about to be hanged. She planned to kill him herself first, and she's good enough with a rifle to do it. She has the scum in her sights, when a man grabs and makes her misfire. The stranger from the dance!Jess McLowry, originally from South Carolina, had lost most of his family and their farm in the Civil War. He had drifted west, where he was forced to kill a man. That man had been a gunslinger, and suddenly Jess had a reputation. He became a hired gun until a tragedy made him turn to gambling instead. When he stopped the kid from firing on the man about to be hanged, he was shocked to be staring in the liquid brown eyes of the girl from the dance. As much as he'd tried, he'd never forgotten her, but he knew he wasn't good enough for a lady like her. When she told him of her plan to kill the five outlaws who'd killed her family, he tried to make her see how costly such vengeance would be. When that failed, he vowed to ride with her and protect her from harm, even from himself.This was a beautiful western romance. The fact that the love was not consummated for so long, just made the romance stronger. It was scattered with some profanity, but it didn't get too bad until about half-way the book, when G.d. was used several times. The sex scenes didn't come until near the end of the book, and they were not descriptive. Grammatical errors were almost non-existent. "Than" was used for "then" and "come" for "home," so the sentence read "coming come." The bad things that happened to Gabe and Jess seemed reasonable to me, considering Gabe stubbornly insisted on tracking seasoned outlaws in the rough Arizona terrain. I found the story drew me in, and I would have loved it, if it had been a little cleaner.