It is SuperLibrarian Wendy’s TBR Challenge time! This month the theme is Contemporary. I was at home sick with a rather nasty bug yesterday, I was feeling all alone and palely loitering in my bedroom – too tired to read but I did not want to watch anything either so I put out a call to twitter for romance fiction audiobook recommendations. Of course, wonderful tweeps everywhere gave me some crackin’ recs including a couple of recommendations for an author I had not heard of called Zoe York. I gave up on working out the intricacies of my eaudio account and downloaded a couple of her ebooks to read from the Pine Harbour series:

Love in a Small Town (Book 1)

by Zoe York

 Six years. Two break ups. One divorce. They should be over each other.

Rafe Minelli knows better than to tell his wife no, particularly since they aren’t married anymore. She can’t hightail it out of town, though, not when they’ve finally broken through the post-divorce cold war status quo. 

Olivia Minelli needs to leave Pine Harbour. It’s just too hard to see Rafe moving on without her—even if he says he doesn’t want to. But when a new and exciting job falls into her lap, she needs to choose: protect her heart, or take the new job and risk getting emotionally entangled with her ex-husband. Again. 

This story is a marriage reconciliation story. Rafe and Olivia have been divorced for two years but she still serves him his daily coffee at the cafe where she works. The story kicks off where he brings his one-night stand in for a breakfast. Olivia is angered and horrified but later finds out that he had not slept with her and in actual fact had remained celibate for their two years apart as he had not really wanted to divorce Olivia. This was quite a sad story of two people who had a strong connection yet did not know how to work through disagreements. I really liked that a lot of the moments of connection for the two was when they were slow dancing (Bingo!) – there is such an intimacy to slow dancing that you don’t even realise that anyone else is there. Their reconciliation story acknowledges that good sex does not mean that problems can be overcome but knowing that they can get past a fight without breaking up and perhaps needing some guidance in achieving this is an important part of Rafe and Olivia’s story. I enjoyed how they slowly came to trust each other again and really liked their connection. Continue reading →