Saturday, December 16, 2023

 Runaway Fire by Tia Capway


 

Who breaks their wedding vows five minutes before they are even spoken? Evidently, Adam. Furious after finding him tupping one of her bride’s maids, Fiona simply ran. There was no going back. Fiona didn’t want to hear anything Adam had to say. She had found shelter in a truck at the fire station and then she had found him, Mason. He had taken one look at her tear-stained face, listened for just a minute to her ranting about Adam and decided to help her. Two things she needed right now, the locks changed on her house and an experienced lover to wipe away what she saw in the walk-in-cooler. He helped her with both of these problems. Then he walked away. He was a one and done kind of guy.

Only one glitch, neither could stop thinking about the other.

 

Mason was a firefighter. He was also a wolf shifter. They had strict laws about not allowing humans to become aware of the supernatural world around them, shifters, and witches. But something was wrong with the magic around them. Mason’s mom and sister, Sharon, were shamans who could sense something was changing around them and not for the better. Sharon had dreams of a witch who would come to the aid of the pack.

 

As a surgeon, Fiona was usually in control but after the fiasco of her wedding, her tryst with Mason and now Adam coming to the hospital throwing a fit, she’d had enough. Furious, she missed the gathering clouds overhead, when lightning struck Adam’s classic and set it ablaze, she burst out laughing. When Mason showed up with the fire department, it seems to just be fate. Fiona felt something was changing in her and the more she thought about it, she was certain she had caused the lightning strike to Adam’s car. Could she be something more?

 

This short tale can be read in one setting, but has hot spicy romance, humor, magic, mystery and an ongoing dark element that appears to have been carried over from other books in the series. For such a short tale the characters were easily relatable for me. I enjoyed their interactions. Evil is ever present, but the source is only slowly being unveiled. The story isn’t a stationary one; the storyline moves forward at a pace that held my interest, with situations and characters that filled the pages. It is a well-played out yarn, however there were a few times that the author lost me and I had to reread a sentence or two. Once, when Fiona was at the firehouse, Mason came up and startled her. The next thing I read, he was picking her up off the floor then, she is brushing herself off. No mention of her falling. I say this because there were a few times I felt like I came in on the middle of a conversation. In spite of and because of the few misses I ran into, I enjoyed the author’s writing style, storyline and characters. I started with the third book then decided I had to have the first two to see what I had missed. There will be a fourth that I am looking forward to reading.  I gave the book four stars because I realize other readers may find descriptive sexual content a trigger, while others find grammatical errors disconcerting.  

 

I was given an advanced readers copy in return for my honest opinion about the storyline and content.

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