DNF (85% in).
This story was doing very well, although it is hard to swallow one major running thread of the story, hard to swallow that a man who is a very handsome devil, charming, sociable, amiable and likeable would be 'in love' with the memory of a girl he met in his teens (and one who married his best friend for that matter) and stay that way until the heroine's arrival on the scene.
The less than overused premise of the hero being the one who's stalked should have made this an intriguing read but it did not. The capital gained by the relative novelty of the theme was quickly squandered when the hero turned at the drop of a hat TSTL, like most of his female counterparts in the genre. This is a man, a captain of the USA Air Force, who is unlawfully accused of rape and GBH by a woman (the whacko of the book), about whom he later learns a ton of bad and disturbing things (e.g., that she very possibly murdered her mother, that when a teenager she murdered/ was an accessory to the murder of a hitchhiker, another teen ), yet he allows this psycho who's tried to ruin his life into his home to pick up his laundry! I wouldn't allow her to be in the same hemisphere as me. To make matters worse, and the plot more stupid than the dodo, the hero conceals from the police who come to his door (because the heroine, who worries about him, alerted them) that the psycho is in his shower. He is sheltering a woman whom he knows has only one purpose in life, to ruin him! Moreover, he is told by the police that this woman is wanted for questioning by the authorities in Arizona, and yet this captain of the USA Airforce, fails to tell them she is right here in his flat!!! As if the psycho dropping the charges against him was all he cared about! This woman has openly tried to blackmail him into a relationship with her; he has known her to be a consummate and nasty liar; she is someone who broke into his flat, searched through his things, read his private correspondence, called his mother and spun unbelievable tales about herself and the hero, and all this the hero knows, but not even the most basic logic can prevent this writer from manipulating her plot in the most ridiculous way. The result is her hero reads like the most stupid mammal on earth. The question as to what would compel someone to allow a psychopath to re-enter one's life and one's home never enters the equation. Is he in love with her? No. He is, supposedly,in love with the heroine. What compelled captain pea-brain to act as he did? To allow the psycho to do his laundry instead of making a citizen's arrest? He doesn't even change his locks (and he knows this disturbed individual was stalking him and made a habit of getting into his flat). So how does Brenda Novak justify her hero's titanic stupidity? Hold on to your hats, the answer to this question is that the poor man just wants to be left in peace! Yes, this is the reason he does not protect himself against a psycho! After all, it is well known that psychos simply stop when they run out of steam and leave you alone!
And as if all that stupidity was not enough to floor you, the writer adds one more layer. When Kalyna (the psycho) starts feeding captain pea-brain the 'I'm pregnant' line, he simply buys it. He doesn't ask for an independent pregnancy test, nor for DNA tests, the single document the psycho showed him was enough for him to start looking at Kalyna as 'the mother of his child'! I want to know what the poor heroine was doing with an idiot like him.
The whole thing is so ridiculous that had it been a bit campier it would have been very comical. But Novak aims for 'serious' and 'angsty', which means no hero should be allowed not to want to be a daddy, should not be allowed not to want to have a child with a terminally disturbed person. You'll never see in romances a hero (or a heroine) who does not want to have a child (or, perish the thought, have a termination. Even if she is 16, she simply longs to be a mother!). Only if you are a psycho and a villain you have abortions (true to the reactionary formula, Kalyna has had two but now she wants to have a baby so that the hero will stay with her). One may ask, even if the hero is convinced this baby is his why should he stay with the psycho? Have Romanceland writers not heard of single mothers, or of fathers paying child support without living with their child? The worst thing about this crap is and remains the fact that it is always the evil woman who does not want children and we are invited to compare that to the 'saintly' heroine who, each time, wants them desperately, radiant angel that she is.
When characters that appeared sort of interesting for half the book suddenly turn stupid I blame the writer. It is obvious that Brenda Novak run out of steam and in total panic ratcheted up the nonsense quotient. As for the supposed love story, it suffers from a totally unconvincing couple. There's nothing about them that spells even the slightest of attachments, let alone romantic love. Most of the time, the hero reminisces about another woman, the girl he and his best friend loved as teenagers (he valiantly backed down, we are told) and who is now a widow. When the hero does not reminisce about a woman other than the heroine his life is dominated by Kalyna, the stalking psycho. So we have two female figures who are far more prominent than the heroine!
What can one say about the heroine (given that the ill conceived and executed character of the hero dominates the bad taste this book generates) other than she spends most of her time avoiding the hero and denying her feelings for him. Why acknowledge feelings of love when you can snap at him instead? She also has a 'boyfriend' (kind of) whom she does not love and does not often see. This is how the book crawls to the 75% mark, when out of this spirit of discord, denial, mistrust, dishonesty, constant bickering, bad plotting and ridiculous characterisation a glorious love is born! Hero and heroine spend a night together (very fade-to-black, as is Novak's style) and immediately afterwards the hero is in love with the heroine (or rather, he doesn't know if he is, then he is certain he is, then he is not, then he thinks maybe he is, and so on). Similarly, the heroine is very suddenly in love with him too and what does she do about it? As you'd expect from such a cartoon character she wants to run away from him and never see him again. If you don't run away from those you fall in love with whom are you going to run away from? The reason this heroine and her writer give is that he must not know of her feelings! If you think they're 13 year olds you'll be wrong, they are in their early thirties. In any case, their whole affair rings more hollow than the hero's one night stand with Kalyna,the psycho.
As the story was getting more nonsensical by the paragraph and hero and heroine more irritatingly stupid and immature by the sentence, I decided enough is enough and gave up only 20 or so pages from the end. I have absolutely no curiosity about these two and the course of their 'love', I care not to know how the villainess was dispatched. I did skip to the last page though where under the heading 'Epilogue' this writer has her characters speed through the whole gamut of Romancia's hilariously painful picture of happiness: engagement, loving in-laws, wedding party and planning to have at least 3 children. Novak forgot the puppies.
PS The hero is so stupid, so incapable of reasoning, so excruciatingly free of brain cells that one wonders how the USA Air Force entrust him with flying a bomber plane. Heaven protect us!