The two main characters in this story are quite broken. Anne Jewell is a teacher with a child out of wedlock. The father of her child was not her love and died before they could marry. Syndam Butler is a man of contrasts, on one side he's very handsome but on the other he's a mass of scars and damage and the damage is mental too. When the two of them come together a friendship builds and they are very attracted, however can either or both of them overcome the issues and problems.
While this wasn't a bad example of the genre, and was a good take on the Beauty and the Beast theme, there was nothing surprising here, it even had moments where I wondered if I had read it all before.
 - Mary Balogh)
