I enjoyed Housekeeper’s Happy-Ever-After, finding it to be a fast read with a complex hero and heroine, but I was left wanting a bit more interaction between the two.

If we had a category in the AAR Annual Reader Poll for most tortured heroine, Ellie Bond would get my vote, hands down. Nearly four years earlier, Ellie’s husband and young daughter were killed in a car accident. While Ellie lived through the accident, she suffered brain damage that has left her with memory and impulse control issues. Things are never going to be the way they were, and Ellie is suffocating in the cottage she and her family lived in. To escape, she asks a friend to help her get a job, and she lands a position as the housekeeper for Mark Wilder.

Mark is a successful music executive with a large home outside of London and a flat in town. Part of the appeal of the job for Ellie is that she’ll work at his country estate, while he’ll be away from home a great deal of the time traveling on business. Mark is attracted to Ellie from their first meeting and, when lost in his big home, she wanders into his bedroom in the middle of the night. When reading that scene, I was worried that the book was going to veer into over-the-top humor, making light of Ellie’s problems. It didn’t.

Both Ellie and Mark touched me. I was fascinated by the coping skills Ellie developed to deal with her memory loss. And once Mark learned about Ellie’s accident, I was touched by the things he did to learn more about her injuries and to help her cope. On the surface, Mark appears to be a gorgeous, wealthy man, with everything in the world, and beautiful women scrambling to be around him. In reality, he’s much softer, and caring, still hurting from a previous relationship.

Although the book is short in length, it takes place over a period of months, with a new chapter often skipping ahead weeks from where the previous one ended. While I enjoyed the book a great deal, I felt that at times this technique left me wanting more. Often, the missing time was filled in briefly with either Ellie or Mark reflecting on what happened. I liked both Ellie and Mark, but would have preferred a bit more dialog between them and a bit less time spent inside their heads. That being said, this book touched me a great deal, and I won’t soon forget Ellie.