Courage of Us by Brooke May
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Patience LaClare is a woman who over the last seven years has lost her courage and become a shell of her former self, she has been in a loveless marriage with a man who cheated on her, blamed her for everything going wrong in his life and verbally abused her, but the day it all became physical is the day she drew the line and asked for a divorce, however, Patience has lost her friends over that time and only has her family and herself to rely on. Duke Micheals is a Marine who left everything behind, including the girl he loved, since then, he has seen more of war than he ever wanted to and when he lost his dog in a tragic encounter with the enemy, he developed PTSD and this meant a medical discharge, leaving the Marines and returning home to his family and all the memories of what he left behind.

Patience is heading to her cafe in her parents grocery store as usual, where she bakes the town’s favourite sweet and savoury snacks, what she doesn’t expect is her car breaking down in the car park at night, when the snow is falling and it is freezing cold, but the last thing she expected was Duke Micheals to come to her rescue on his way back from filling in the paperwork so he can start his new job as a deputy in the local police department. The surprise stops them both from being able to form words, but it is Patience who breaks the silence first but her words are sarcastic, independent and scathing, but she reluctantly accepts the lift home from him, the silence between them is deafening and when she gets into her house, she is an emotional mess, but so is Duke after he drops her off. Seeing Patience has solidified what Duke was thinking that she needs him as much as he needs her, however, it is also clear that she will not be as easy to convince as he hoped, he will have to put in a lot of work to pull the person she was out of the person she is and he knows just how to do it, he will simply start by asking her to dinner and then see where that takes them.

As the days progress, Patience and Duke start to spend more time together as friends and catch up on the times since they last saw each other, things are going well but there are a lot of feelings to sort through and pasts to be shared, this takes a long time as the things they need to share are painful and hard to talk about and it doesn’t help when their families meddle and try to speed the process up. The two realise that they still feel as strongly for the other as they did seven years before, but also that the attraction they felt has multiplied as they have gotten more mature and grown into themselves.

Will they be able to reveal all the hurt they are hanging onto and overcome the barriers they have each built around their hearts, or will it all be too much when they find out what the other has been through and leave them reeling away from each other? This is a second chance romance where friends who have been broken try to come back together as adults with all their baggage included, where tenderness, grief, love and loss collide with the past, present and future to create a journey which envelops you and takes you along for the ride.

Reviewed by @roxsannel

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