Judith’s review of
Bound By Trust by Lila Munro
The Widow After her husband Gage is killed in combat, Madi Melbourne finds out just how hard being a widow can be. She’s been left destitute, piecing together a life she never knew Gage was living, and as the puzzle takes shape, she begins to fall apart.
Her Savior Rafe McCarthy has always been known as the unit playboy. Having never married and being childless, he finds himself examining his life and looking at the what-ifs. Then a beautiful widow moves in next door and he begins to discover something he never knew existed inside of him.
Learning to trust… How can he convince her to trust again and place that trust in him? Will he be able to live up to the responsibility he has taken in teaching her to love again?
After the death of Staff Sgt. Gage Melbourne in Afghanistan, Madison Melbourne was trying to get her life back together. She was neck deep in trouble because he had obviously had a life apart from her own, complete with purchases for luxury items she didn’t even know about. Now the creditors were making her life a living hell and she didn’t know how to extract herself from this nightmare. She could no longer afford to live in Kentucky so she moved to Missouri, near Ft. Leonard Wood, where her grandmother had left her an old house, one that needed lots of work, but which would at least provide her a place where she could begin her life once more. Her greatest sorrow was leaving behind the grave of her unborn child, her little girl Shannon, the reason she and her husband had married initially. Now, ten years later, he is dead, she has no source of income other than her music students, and she is alone.
A night out at a local bar soon after arriving in Missouri changes the course of her life. She catches the eye of Gunnery Sgt Rafe McCarthy, a career Marine who had decided that he would not marry as long as he was in the military. Yet he is captivated by Madi, and after dancing with her leads her out to a dark corner in the patio behind the bar. Their intense attraction explodes in an erotic encounter. Rafe wants to take her home with him, but after a brief stop off at the men’s room, he discovers that Madi is gone–and he didn’t even know her name. Little did he realize that she was his new neighbor across the street.
Their relationship grows very quickly–in spite of the fact that Madison has major trust issues. After being sandbagged by her husband’s hidden debt, she belatedly receives his personal effects, some of which were love letters to two other women. Imagine her complete horror to discover that he was planning to divorce her. So trusting anyone, least of all a man and one in the military, was almost impossible.
This is a very warm and emotional story about two people who need each other to complete their lives but who are both working through some very large piles of personal baggage. It is a complicated relationship that is not really made easier by the fact that Rafe and Madi get married almost on a whim only weeks after meeting one another. They really didn’t know each other very well. Rafe is a wonderful, caring, giving and quite gentle man–he wants Madison in his life and he is willing to do almost anything. She wants Rafe, recognizing that he is not anything like her dead husband, yet she just can’t seem to let go of the past and all the fears and insecurities connected to that first marriage. They have great sex but they aren’t very good at talking out their problems. Rafe doesn’t share some of his concerns because he doesn’t want to scare Madi off. Madi doesn’t share her fears because she is afraid Rafe will leave her as her former husband did. They get caught in some issues that just don’t go away simply in spite of the fact that things are good in the bedroom. Eventually even the bedroom gymnastics end as well and their relationship is in real trouble.
This is clearly a story that is taken right out of our contemporary situation of a nation that is fighting wars in the Middle East. It is a story that is set in the military family genre–so many hundreds of families are going through what Madison experienced. It is a well-known fact that military marriages fail at an alarming rate because of the pressure-cooker in which they are formed and the long absences that make loneliness so hard to bear. I really tapped into the emotions in this story because I was an Army wife for nearly six years and I experienced some of the loneliness and the extra burdens that wives have to bear with money problems and children issues while one’s husband is deployed away from the family. It just isn’t easy. Madison’s needs were never really met–her husband was a philandering jerk to begin with and their marriage was a sham. To find this out after his death couldn’t have been easy.
Yet this is a really good novel. The love story will warm your heart and the emotions can’t help but resonate with the reader’s feelings, regardless of their personal experiences. Ms Munro has written of this context with great sensitivity and created characters that are strong, believable, flawed as we all are, living with the same stresses we all face, and having to juggle relationships with jobs and friends and family. Perhaps this novel’s deepest message, though, is that no relationship can hope to be sustained without open honesty and transparency. Fears and insecurities only grow in shadows, and those kinds of “secrets” only add to the potential for damage and possibly destruction in the end.
I liked this book a lot. It remained in my thoughts long after I finished it. It gave me lots to think about and ponder. I like books that do that. So it will be understandable when I say that romance fans will like this story. It was really a very good reading experience for me.
I give this novel a rating of 4.5 out of 5.
This book is available from Whiskey Creek Press. You can buy it in
here in e-format.
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