When she agreed to spend her last summer before college at her cousins’ house in Ireland, Charli Moretti never expected to meet anyone like Rhys Doyle. He was the first boy to ever make her heart flutter, and though their lives followed different paths after that fateful summer, she always remembered him as her first everything.

Sixteen years later, after a tumultuous divorce from her abusive husband, Charli is returning to Ireland a shell of the woman she once was. Life has tried to break her many times over, and now all she wants is a fresh start and an even keel. She’ll be working as an accountant at her uncle’s hotel, but what she doesn’t know is that Rhys Doyle works there, too. He’s the head of security, in fact, and he’s no longer the teenage boy she once knew.

With the rumours flying around that he and his fiancée just broke off their engagement, Charli decides it’s best to give Rhys his space. She knows personally how hard it can be when a relationship ends. The problem is, she can’t seem to stop running into him, and the more she gets to know the man he’s become the more those old feelings start to return.

Tropes & Themes:
~Second chance~
~Workplace romance~
~Protector hero~
~Summer fling~
~Tragic past~
~Starting over~

Quiet Longing is book #2 in The Quiet Love Series and can be read as a standalone.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

 

It was an ache I’d barely even known was there before I met her. I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant, but it felt a lot like longing. Longing for connection, for someone to understand me, to know and accept all the things I normally kept hidden.

This world is full of people who’ll put us down. We don’t need to do it to ourselves, too.

Being alone in a room with Rhys was like swallowing the antidote to all my worries and fears. His presence seeped into my bloodstream like medicine.

It was the kind of place a burglar only had to breathe on the locks to get inside.

I think of nothing else. If you cracked open my skull, all you’d find are thoughts of you…

My Review:

I always enjoy a second-chance romance, and although I don’t typically appreciate angst, I didn’t seem to mind it this time. Written with two timelines and in my favorite dual point of view, the storylines were engaging and realistic and laced together with real-life concerns. Ms. Cosway’s writing style continues to be easy to follow, thoughtfully parsed, and poignantly penned.