Diamond Bay, by Linda Howard

I was in a Linda Howard kind of mood, so I decided to reread Diamond Bay.

He was barely alive. Someone had shot him twice. Trusting her instincts, Rachel didn't call the police. Her sixth sense told her that she was his only hope. With him lying unconscious before her, Rachel had to decide his future, as well as her own.

Unfortunately, I did not enjoy it as much as I remember doing the first time I read it. Still, not bad. A B-.

What went wrong? Basically, Kell was too "macho action hero" for me, and I didn't really "buy" his whole thing about not being able to handle having a wife again. It was so obvious that if he found someone he loved and really wanted to be with her, as happened with Rachel, there were ways. In fact, the ending proved that. So his moaning about how impossible it was didn't make me feel at all sorry for him.

Rachel I mostly liked. She was one of Howard's strongest heroines, both physically as well as emotionally. The only thing I didn't like much was how she fell "in love" so soon, and made herself completely vulnerable to Kell. That's a bit of a double standard I have, since I would have loved the book if it had been the hero who'd felt like that. At least the sexual tension was incredible, as it always is in a Linda Howard book.

Not Howard's best, but not a bad way to spend a couple of hours at the hairdresser's ;-)