I love to cook. It relaxes me. My kitchen is my sanctuary. I got mad skills too. This past weekend I decided that I wanted Mexican. (To clarify, the type of food and not a type of guy.) Fajitas to be exact.
I didn't have any salsa. I had everything I needed to make one, but decided since I had some fresh pineapple to make a sweet pineapple salsa instead. Yes, you guessed it, I am a chance taker. I found a pretty easy recipe on the Internet. 1/2 of a pineapple. 1 small red onion. 2 tablespoons cilantro 2 tablespoons of lemon juice 2 jalapeño peppers diced. Salt and pepper to taste. Okay, I am willing to take chances when it comes to ingredients. In fact I will try anything once. But I am not crazy about hot stuff. I want to be able to taste my food and when there is a lot of heat in something I find that it stops my taste buds from working correctly. So in anticipation of that I only added 1/2 of 1 jalapeño to the salsa. It looked beautiful. It smelled beautiful. The taste? Hmmm, how can I describe this in a way that makes complete sense and paints a picture. There was no taste. None at all. There was just heat. Heat. Hot. Hot. More heat. All I felt was heat. Too much heat. It was so bad that I wanted to cut my own lips off. And to top it off, I had no milk. Luckily I remembered a container of Oikos Greek pineapple yogurt was sitting in the back of my fridge. Thank you John Stamos for being so damn cute I bought your yogurt and had it on hand. I was in pain for almost 30 minutes (which actually felt more like days that passed in a haze of pain and suffering) until I started to get relief from the dairy. But the best part, and I can't even believe I am putting this out there, was when I got into the shower. I thought I had washed all of the heat from the jalapeño off of my hands, turns out, I was wrong. And I don't even want to go into how I know I was wrong or what I touched that I later needed to slather yogurt over to get the burning to stop. Trust me that is one mental picture you really don't need or want. Trust me.
Spent all day yesterday working on a friends blog. One of my friends that I met on twitter. In fact we have never met face to face. What I find astounding is that while we have never met, we have had some wonderful, deep conversations. We are both part of a book club that was founded on Twitter. She has become one of my favorite people. She is funny, sarcastic, snarky and loyal. It's not to easy to find friends the older you get so I feel doubly blessed that Karla, as well as the rest of the bookhungry gals have come into my life. So where am I going with this? Well you read where I said Karla is snarky? So much so that she pretty much never has anything nice to say to anyone. Well, not to me anyway. But yesterday was different. Why? Because she went on the record about how wonderful I am. So today I am sharing with you so it will be a matter of public record forever.
Dylan Prescott and Gary Tanner were best friends since they were kids and that friendship withstood the test of time. Even when Gary married Rachel, the one women Dylan wanted but couldn't have.
Rachel was off limits. And Dylan respected that. His best friend got to her first. So he went on and built a successful business while maintaining his friendship with Gary, but only viewing their marriage in a peripheral capacity. That is until Gary dies.
Then everything changes. Rachel knew the first time she met Gary he was going to be someone special. After all he ate the special apple. Rachel's family owns an orchard and once every so many years one special tree will bear fruit. Family legend says whomever eats the apple that a female descendant shares from this tree is destined to be her one true love. On their first meeting Rachel gave Gary one of those apples. So for her, when their romance goes whirlwind she isn't surprised. It was after all part of the plan. Once Gary is gone a bunch of inconsistencies start to show cracks in a foundation that Rachel had been sure was rock solid. In the beginning you feel for her because her husband has just died, but as the story progresses you have to wonder how Rachel could have been so oblivious. Her husband spent every week in the city where he worked while she stayed on the farm. While he was alive this worked for them for the duration of their marriage. This was something I would never understand. What is the point of getting married if you aren't going to grow your lives together? But okay, I suspended disbelief because this author did a good job of painting Gary as the guy who just wanted his wife to be happy. And if that meant she didn't want to live in the city so be it. As the story progresses, we learn that maybe his selflessness had more of a selfish tint than we might have expected. When the story starts Dylan is confronted by Rachel's fears and concerns that Gary didn't die in an accident, but actually took his own life. Now she is wondering if Gary had more going on in the city where he spent all that time? Rachel doesn't know what to believe, or even if she really wants to know, but she does know where to get the answers. Dylan, her husbands best friend.
In a nut shell this story sucked me in. I wanted to know if Gary killed himself. I wanted to know if he was having an affair. These were all things that grabbed me and kept me turning the page. And of course Rachel and Dylan are forced to face their mutual attraction. An attraction we learn, that has been simmering for years.
There is a secondary romance with Rachel's younger sister that I adored, more so than the main story. I think because by the end I was no longer longer invested in the romance, just in the mystery of what happened to Gary. At least I got my closure on that issue, but I did have a hard time with some of the closing points.
Overall it was a good read and won't deter me from picking up another of Ms. Freethy books. But this wasn't a keeper. At least not for me. Have you read it? If so, tell me what you thought.
