Buzzword Cover Challenge 25: Transportation
Doctor Fionn Kane is doing just fine in the little Nebraska town he retreated to after leaving his promising surgical career and ex-fiancee behind. He doesn’t really want anything to do with the past-times of either of his brothers and is keeping his head down, running and working out when he’s not working in his small medical clinic or the hospital. He also crochets. Then a beautiful woman with a severe leg injury ends up nearly unconscious on the floor of his clinic, asking him for help before she passes out. Fionn doesn’t realise that despite his attempts to live a calm and uneventful life, chaos has just found him.
Rose Evans has worked at Silveria Circus for over a decade. She has a fortune telling booth, reading tarot cards for paying customers, and also rides her motorcycle every evening in death-defying stunts. She’s also has a very particular interest in botany, and as the Sparrow, she has provided many a woman with the means to incapacitate or kill an abusive partner. Normally, she doesn’t do any of the killing herself, but when an obviously terrified woman comes to her for a reading, and Rose is able to figure out where the family lives, she decides to take matters (and a baseball bat) into her own hands, to rid the family of their abusive husband/father. Except Rose seriously underestimates the rage and strength of the man she attacks, and ends up with a badly broken leg before she manages to jam some cocktail sticks in the guy’s eye, giving her enough time to escape on her motorcycle. She locates the local clinic, desperate to find something for the pain, and passes out shortly after the handsome doctor finds her.
A circus performer with a broken leg can’t do her job, so the travelling circus leaves Rose and her RV in Nebraska, planning to pick her up once she’s had time to heal. On crutches, after the complicated break, Rose isn’t able to mount the stairs to her RV. Fionn has a spare room in his house and surprises himself by inviting the intriguing woman to stay with him until she’s had time to recover. Fionn is used to depriving himself of the things he truly desires, so staying away from Rose, his patient, should be fine, right?
Readers of the rest of Brynne Weaver’s Ruinous Love trilogy, will have already met Fionn and Rose in Butcher & Blackbird (when Ronan and Sloane show up unexpectedly requiring medical help they can’t really get from a hospital) and in Leather & Lark, where the final events left things looking pretty critical for Rose (spoiler: she doesn’t die). Plot-wise, the events of this book start a while before Ronan and Sloane show up, and continues as a sequel to both previous books, so the readers can discover how Rose is pulled back from death’s door.
Full review here.