Come Home to Me by Brenda Novak

Oh the feels. The many, many feels. Brenda Novak does not always craft a... comfortable story,

Image linked from Goodreads

but she always manages to evoke strong emotions in her readers. At least me. Lots of spoilers in this review so I'm going to hide most of it.

SECRET BABY! Maybe two secret babies. This is such an overused storyline in the Harlequin romance novels and it irked me for much of the first part of the story. But... these are damaged people that Novak is writing about. They're not some white-bread secretary who only hides the baby because of some twisted logic. Okay, yes, Presley should have told Aaron. But, by the stated parameters of their relationship, they were only hooking up. And she was taking a lot of drugs at that point so... who knows. Then there's the burden of the relationship she had after she ran away to Arizona. It sounds... dark. Very dark.
The whole plotline with Cheyenne wanting to artificially inseminate herself with her brother-in-law's sperm also felt like it should be irksome. But, it somehow wasn't that bad once we found out that Dylan was also hiding things in their marriage. Again, coming from the same families as Presley and Aaron, these are two people who love each other so much but have never been around a good marriage to see how burdens shared can be burdens lightened (oh, god, that's so twee but yet so true.) I spent the second half of the book with my fingers crossed that they would just talk to each other and trusting in Novak to bring all of the tangled webs to a happy conclusion.