A Reno Wedding With Baggage . . . "No Holds Barred" by Jaydyn Chelcee

Rimrock—Home of the Montana men and the women who tame them.

Professional horse trainer Kaycee Spencer decides to relocate when she becomes the target of an insane stalker. She chooses remote Rimrock, Montana where no one can find her.

Jace Remington, co-owner of the Dancing Star Ranch, refuses to allow women around his thoroughbreds—females are nothing but trouble with a capital ‘T’—that is, until he meets Kaycee Spencer, a woman who crashes into his peaceful life with trouble close on her heels. 

Set against the backdrop of the rugged mountains of Montana, Kaycee and Jace discover that if they are going to survive the vicious serial killer stalking Kaycee, they will have to learn to trust each other.   No Holds Barred, a roller-coaster ride of murder, romance, and the discovery that love just might conquer all.

This second novel in the Montana Men series was first released in 2008 and has now been re-released by Secret Cravings Publishing and is a doozy.  There is a sick stalker/serial killer who wants Kaycee and will do and has done unspeakable things to get her just so he can abuse, molest, and ultimately kill her.  In the Arms of Danger began this series and told the story of Sheriff Danger Blackstone and his love relationship with Lacey Weston who eventually became his wife.  There story continues on here as part of the back story, but this is Kaycee and Jace's story, two strong people who have been overwhelmed by life in many ways and whose encounter in Duel Remington's casino in Reno, Nevada, ends up being hot, erotic, and capped off with a marriage license.  That's just the beginning of the "road to true love" that is loaded with potholes, not the least of which is Jace's stepmother, a woman who is perverted in her own special way, and with Kaycee's brother Taylor, a man who has been severely injured in an auto accident with Kaycee driving.  You can imagine the dynamic between that brother/sister combo.

This is a story that is filled with high emotion, sexual hijinks, old wounds from family abuse, a stalker/serial killer whose sickness seems to continually escalate, secondary figures who become more important as the story moves along, and the pain of hurting lovers and the loss of people who become more important in death than they did in life.  There is deep sadness here as well as hope and deep family loyalty.  This is a novel that may be set in the beauty of Montana, have the potential for being a wonderful love story, but which is tainted and colored with greed, distrust,  and anger.  The novel is intense in a gritty and edgy way, with the story moving from character to character, scene to scene, all of it in such a way that the reader wonders what else can happen and will the bad guy really manage to do harm to so many people.  It is a cliff hanger of sorts and is filled with suspense that will surely carry over into the following novels.  This writer was new to me before I found Book One but I have been enthralled with both the first two books and can't wait to read the next three.  It's a book that suspense romance fans will enjoy, but be prepared:  you will be hooked.  I give it a rating of 4.25 out of 5.

Review: In the Arms of Danger by Jaydyn Chelcee

Danger Blackstone--that is, Sheriff Danger Blackstone was the law in this town, a compact little community in Montana, a town that had seen vandalism and the disappearance of women over the past months. Now, in the middle of the night, Ms Lacey Weston had been caught sneaking amid the shadows, and she is now under arrest. The sheriff is taking no chances.v>

Lacey Weston is a photo journalist who has come to Montana to do a series on the Western United States. But she has seen far more than she planned--namely, the murder of a young woman, a person who she watched being tortured and finally whose life was snuffed out before her eyes. She managed to run, and run she did, for miles and miles it seemed, until she landed in Sheriff Blackstone's jail. She didn't stay there long, however. Through a series of somewhat comical events, Ms Weston found herself free and in possession of the sheriff's SUV keys, and the sheriff was sitting in her cell in his undies. Little did she know that the gas tank was almost empty with a major storm on the horizon, a storm that ultimately put her life in real danger.

This is a complicated novel that involves the hang-ups of two people: 1) a sheriff that is competent and effective as a lawman, but who has hang-ups about his mixed racial heritage. You can easily make out the shape of the chip on his shoulder. Yet he has a heart that is as big as the state of Montana, and even though Lacey Weston has humiliated him and is on the run, he knows her life is in jeopardy and he is obligated to find her before she dies. 2) A photo-journalist who is still trying to break through the professional "glass ceiling," who is tired of being put down because of her gender, who bristles at the dismissive way the sheriff has handled her report of the "supposed" murder, and who believes that her life is in danger, more from the murderer than from the coming storm.

The early encounter between these two is protracted to the point that it was a bit wearisome for me--I just felt it could have been shorter and just as effective. Yet it was humorous and I had to chuckle a number of times. There was no getting around their attraction to one another, but the sexual tension between them was frequently neutralized by Lacey's arrogance and Danger's penchant for treating her like an empty-headed female. Their adventure gets even more involved as Danger must rescue her from roaring flood waters, must find a way to get them both out of the Montana wilderness safely, while knowing they were being tracked by the murderer.

There's lots to like in this novel although I think the action is spotty sometimes. That is not to say that it isn't interesting. Both main characters are strong and vibrant, their feelings about themselves sometimes getting in the way more than they should, but they come to some kind of alliance necessary to combat their dangerous situation. Both Lacey and Danger have to move out of their emotional comfort zones to begin understanding one another, especially Danger who has a very skewed opinion of women and whose not-very-well-hidden complex about his mixed heritage keeps surfacing. Behind the scenes is the rather endearing context of Danger's ancient grandparents, both of whom are probably on the edge mentally, and yet the reader is not really able to discern if this is approaching dementia or really two very wise and savvy Native American shamans who know far more about life and the future than most people are comfortable with.

This is the first of Ms Chelcee's novels I have read, but I am looking forward to reading the next in this series. I give the novel a 3.75 out of 5 rating.