Her hunky outdoor doc...
Her first sighting of Dr. Wyatt Beauchamp is of him with his shirt off—all deliciously bronzed corded muscle and mouthwatering abs—and nurse Imogen Donally hopes the next six months working in his remote mountain practice will be…more interesting than she'd originally thought!
Only, her Dr. Tall, Dark and Handsome quickly proves to be more Tall, Dark and Seriously Brooding…. Tough cookie Imogen has no desire ever to settle down, but even she is reluctantly intrigued by a man just as haunted by the past as she is. Could a red-hot fling with the sexy, stubborn doc be Imogen's undoing?
1/2Review
****Harlequin (UK) Limited through NetGalley gave me a copy of
this book for my honest review****
Imogen is a traveling nurse, a free spirit when she is ready to
leave she just packs up and goes, she hides the fact that what she is really
doing is running away from her past. The only friend she stays close to is
Amanda and when she needs her help Imogen comes running, she volunteers to
takes Amanda’s place working on the medical bus. Wyatt is the doctor Imogen is
supposed to be working with, he has his own past that he is trying to get over
and their first meeting is less than good. With Imogen pushing for the job
Wyatt gives in and the physical lust between the two of them starts its own set
of complications. Can these two scarred people get over their pasts, work
together and maybe have a future? This is one of my first medical romance books
and I liked it a lot. I originally thought that there was going to be to a lot
of medical lingo in the book, that was not the case and I was really happy
about that because I would have been lost. I personally was not a fan of the
names Imogen and Wyatt, but I did like the characters. Imogen came across as an
upbeat strong happy woman with a take charge attitude. Wyatt was a good doctor
he just had problems connecting to people. This was a quick read, there were
more than a few moments of angst throughout the book that were generously balanced
out with humor, hope and some hot sex. This was a good book whether you like
medical romances or not.
First I wanted to thank the lovely(and ever busy) Moms for hosting me at my very first stop on my very first blog tour of my very first book!
It’s fitting my first published book is set in Appalachia, where I grew up and currently reside. I certainly had plenty of material, and loved incorporating local landmarks and culture into this book. I wanted to acquaint you with one landmark—well I call it that though if you find it on your own, you’re probably going to be quite lost in the woods. It is a real place. Strange, but real.
Book Inspiration I -- The Forest Graveyard
By the time I was in high school, we'd lived in more than one forest--which was good because we needed new ground to cover. A couple miles into the woods from where I now live, way up in the hills, is something I've never stumbled upon in the middle of any other woods: a very small and old(for the area) graveyard.
It’s not unusual for a multitude of small family plots to dot the landscape in the rural county where I live, but they’re generally in accessible(ish) areas. But the one that inspired the Beauchamp family graveyard is far into the woods. There appears to be no trail or road to get there, and the climb is so steep I can't imagine how they got the dead up there to bury them. It's one of those climbs where you pull yourself up by using the trunks of trees growing out from the hill as if they were limbs on a tree.
I've not been up there for years(seriously, that climb is awful, steep and so slippery), but it's the sort of find that makes an impression on you. It's easy to go right back there in my mind.
Six graves, all from the Chaffin family(founding settlers in the area). They're close together and protected by a three foot high(and nearly two foot thick) white hewn-stone wall. Between erosion, years of autumn leaves, and moss, what's carved on the markers is hard to read. You can make out the a few names and a couple dates(late 1700s/early 1800s), but most of it is lost and no one will climb over that wall to take a rubbing.
Aside from the location and the wall, what makes this small graveyard so large in my memory are the trees. I'm used to modern, well-tended cemeteries, but no one tended these graves. Trees surround the wall, normal-looking trees, but they also grow inside it. And the trees that grow from the center of those graves are impressive. Hardy. Thick. Big, well-fed trees.
That probably sounds pretty creepy, and I know I come to the situation with a lifetime of love for these wooded hills, but to me it's a beautiful place. I see those trees as an affirmation of life. A massive tree grew from the only grave I was ever able to make out the full name, Sara Chaffin, who died very young and around 1800. I always thought of the tree as Sara, not Sara's Tree, just Sara... because some part of her still lives through this towering sycamore.
Excerpt
Imogen ate the first half of her sandwich and let herself study him. “Amanda said the white block thing was a graveyard.
“Why were you two talking about that?” Danger. Wyatt’s voice was too quiet. Too level.
“Because you hardly give any information when I ask you questions.” Imogen garbled her way through peanut-butter throat, reconsidering the other half of her sticky sandwich.
“And you never wonder why that is?” He shook his head, half snorting at her.
“I don’t need to wonder, I know why. You don’t want to talk about anything. I get it. Really. I don’t want to know, but somehow I can’t stop asking. I blame whatever instincts made me become a nurse.”
“You’re back to wanting to heal me.” He looked over the trees he’d harvested, but not at her. He studiously avoided looking at her.
“No. Not really. Comfort, maybe. Understand, for sure. But I’m pretty sure no one can heal you but you.” Imogen rewrapped the other half of the sandwich and set it back on the basket.
“So wise.”
“You make it hard to like you.”
“But you keep trying.” He did look at her then with eyes blacker than the soil she’d spent an hour sliding around in to make it to his side, and she couldn’t read them. Nothing past one simple imperative: Stay Away.
“I keep getting these snippets of information.” And peeks at different Wyatts. She needed help sorting them out. “And everyone keeps telling me to take care of you. Plus, you have a mystery graveyard in the woods, which, by the way, is not at all serial-killer-like of you.”
The bit about people telling her to take care of him sharpened his gaze, but he shifted past it to say, “It’s old. If the person who started it was a serial killer, they lived and died in the seventeen hundreds, and are probably buried up there.”
Apparently the graveyard was easier to talk about than him needing to be taken care of.
***
There will be prizes along the way so if you would like to follow the tour, behold the tour calendar in easy-peasy picture-clicky format!
http://www.amalieberlin.com/current-book-tour.html
