Nicole Jordan is known for her scorching sensuality, but who knew she could write a two-hanky read? The Heart Breaker is a finish-in-one-sitting western romance between a man who’s lost his true love and a woman who’ll do almost anything to get through to him. Heather puts up with a lot more crap from Sloan McCord than just about any romance heroine I’ve read before. While it sometimes seemed ludicrous that she just didn’t tell him to “f__k off” about ten times a day, in the end I was thrilled when their love won out.

Maybe it was because Sloan wasn’t a hero-who’d-been-burned-before. No, he’d loved Doe, his Cheyenne wife, and felt tremendous guilt over her death. So when his family and friends convinced him that marrying a white woman this time around would be good for his budding political career, he agreed – but with one caveat. He would not give his heart to her, no matter that she aroused constant lust in him, took to the hard Colorado ranching life better than he expected, and was raising his half-breed daughter with nothing but love.

Heather had made a choice when she agreed to marry Sloan. She could marry wealthy Evan Randolph, erase the debts her dead father had saddled her with, and become a bird in a gilded cage, or she could go somewhere and actually do something with her life. She opted for the latter, not realizing that coming to love a man who cannot love in return is practically a fate worse than death.

Sloan easily awakens the passion in Heather, which scares them both. At first he avoids physical contact, and then, when lust wins out, he retreats immediately afterward, leaving Heather alone and afraid of her feelings. Then he decides to treat her like his personal whore, giving her his passion but nothing else. Neither of these paths has the intended results, however, because his obsession with his beautiful wife continues to grow. At times he treats her as an equal, at others, most others, he treats her like dirt. She mostly takes it because of the glimmers of tenderness he shows for her. If only he’d show her one-tenth of the love he lavishes on his daughter. . . .

Eventually Heather stands up to Sloan in a scene of astonishing intensity and everything blows up in their faces. Most romances in which a similar scene occurs has the hero realizing he’s screwed up and begging forgiveness. Not this for Sloan and Heather, however, and the remaining chapters had me riveted. How would they get back together, how would he come around, how would he convince her to give him another chance?

Now for the annoyances: author Jordan over does the love scenes in a peculiar way. It made me sore just to read about it frankly, because there’s so darn much thrusting going on. And I was bothered by a couple of phrasings the author devised. One which showed up throughout the book was the use of “masculine” and “feminine” to describe nearly everything Sloan or Heather did or was. Shades of purple. And one love scene which would otherwise have been quite enjoyable was nearly ruined with this lovely phrase: “He tongued her stiffened teats. . . .” Cows have teats, not women, even if the one doing the tonguing is a rancher!

Finally, Evan Randolph is portrayed initially as a villain – he tries to force himself on Heather when he discovers she’s to marry another man. So his behavior subsequently was automatically suspect, and the metamorphosis in his later actions seemed odd and unexplained. But then, all the external threats these two face fizzled in their plotting. It’s as though the author ran out of steam for anything but their internal warring.

Any book that has me reaching for the Kleenex more than once and that I can and want to finish in one evening earns an automatic rating of B from me. The problems I’ve mentioned earn it a B-, but I’ll want to read the prequel to this book, called The Outlaw, which is the love story between Sloan’s brother Jake and Heather’s friend Caitlin. There will be a third book as well, about Doe’s half-brother Wolf. He’s yummy.