It was pretty great until a corny ending. This is the story of a small-town girl with conservative, almost prudish values, clashing with an arrogant, rich, worldly and dare-devilish hero. The heroine was sympathetic and relatable. The hero remained pretty childish, stubborn, and arrogant til the very end, which does not bode for a solid HEA imho.
The heroine meets the hero when she is part of a rescue mission searching for the pilot of a private plane who crashed in a mountainous area when he was having a “joy ride” without permission of the authorities. Her team finds him unconscious but miraculously alive and rush him to the hospital. She is tasked with literally holding his hand and talking to him as he comes in and out of consciousness, while they are transporting him.
A week later, the hero is released from the hospital and makes a beeline to the heroine’s place of work, intent on finding the woman who he thinks of as his guardian angel. Things do not go well. Heroine has read up on hero. He has been tabloid fodder for years due to his extreme stunts, whether mountain climbing Mount Everest or crossing the oceans on a sailboat, all seemingly for the thrill and publicity. She resents him for putting people like her, who risk their lives everyday for a good cause, unnecessarily at risk by deliberately flouting conventions and challenging death for fun. And when he is not pulling a stunt, he is indulging in female groupies, from the ski bunnies on the slopes of Saint Moritz to glamorous models in London nightclubs.
The heroine, on the other hand, has lived a sedate life as a bank teller in her small town, while volunteering on the local search and rescue, ever since her high school boyfriend died while they were having their own bit of a joy ride and the car plunged off a cliff. She was unhurt physically but stuck in the car for five hours with her dead boyfriend next to her, until she was rescued. She lives with the immense guilt of having challenged him to have some fun by calling him a “wet blanket” and such, leading to their accident. When the hero calls her a “wet blanket” and other choice names because she criticizes him and doesn’t fall at his feet like one of his groupies, she is triggered.
To her great surprise, the next day, the hero shows up at her search and rescue and offers himself as a volunteer. The heroine is skeptical but the hero goes to great length to follow the rules and training and become a part of the team. They gradually befriend each other and the hero confesses his Great Traumatik Seekret to her: His dream to become a pilot for the Air Force was unfulfilled due to a shattered eardrum and ever since then, he has been doing the daredevil bit because life has lost all meaning. I thought that was so lame honestly! The heroine feels wildly attracted to him but she is weary. What possible future could there be for them when she is firmly entrenched in Cochise Bend, Arizona and he is always flying off to the next destination and the next daredevil stunt?
Things come to a head when they spend a weekend at a ski resort in Yosemite and the hero declares himself in love and he wants to marry the heroine. The heroine is wildly in love by now but still weary. Her concerns are crystallized when the hero tells her of his next upcoming adventure climbing El Capitan, an impossibly steep mountain that is even more dangerous than Mount Everest. She gives him an ultimatum and he reacts badly. They separate for six weeks during which they are both miserable but both stubborn. In the end, it’s the heroine who compromises and returns to him for their dubious HEA. She is signing up for another future tragedy, in my opinion, which makes this “happy ending” wobbly at best. I enjoyed the story overall but not the hero.