Ever since she was a girl, Faith Devlin has adored superb, sophisticated Gray Rouillard.
They're at opposite ends of the social scale.
Gray's father virtually owns the small township of Prescott and Faith looks up to Gray as the ideal adolescent hero.
That image is shattered in one devastating night that forever changes the lives of both Gray and Faith.
Gray's father, a notorious womanizer has finally gone over the edge and left his family, vanishing into the night with his lover - Faith's mother.
Upon discovering these disappearances, Gray takes out his overwhelming rage on Faith and the rest of her family by evicting them in the middle of the night, from the Rouillard-owned shack that they'd been living in for free.
The memory of that night forms the rest of Faith's life.
Her goal is to return to Prescott and find out what really happened to Gray's father (Guy) and her mother (Renee).
Faith has worked extremely hard to improve her lot in life and make something of herself.
She is no longer the small town girl from a family of white trash.
Faith anticipates that she won't be widely welcomed on her return to Prescott - her family's reputation of petty thieving still stuck, even twelve years later.
It doesn't help her case that she's the spitting image of her mother.
In an effort to protect his still fragile remaining family members, Gray tries to again run Faith out of town, this time by making it difficult for her to easily live there.
His plans are thwarted in a number of ways.
Faith is determined to stay in Prescott until she has solved the mystery.
Someone else in town is unimpressed with Faith's investigations and begins to threaten her.
Gray discovers that he's attracted to Faith, and finds himself fiercely protective of her.
As he spends more time with her and she shares some discoveries which raise more questions, it make him question what really did precede that night 12 years ago.
While the overall plot of the story is okay, my main comment about this story is my difficulty in liking the hero as a person.
While the reader can appreciate Gray's physical attractions, and Faith's left-over-from-her-teens attraction to him, he wasn't and isn't the nicest person at all.
For a guy who did have a bit of a soft spot for Faith as a fourteen year old girl, he showed absolutely no care or concern for her welfare when he watched her gather her family's meagre possessions, which had been thrown out of the house and into the yard by his police buddies.
During her desperate collecting of belongings, she was hampered the whole time by her six year old retarded brother clinging to her legs.
She'd been as much a victim of his father's and her mother's actions as 22 year old Gray had, yet he put her through this additional trauma.
On top of this, he tells her she is "nothing but trash".
He repeats that wording 12 years later when he kicks her out of her motel room.
(He owns the only motel in town.
) He also has no qualms about shaking her or grabbing her wrists until he leaves a bruise.
This makes him borderline abusive, making it hard to relate to him as the romantic hero.
It makes the reader wonder what Faith sees in him, particularly when he does or says nothing to redeem himself in regards to his words and actions of 12 years ago.
So the almost instant attraction between them twelve years later, without any clearing up about or apologies regarding that night, didn't quite sit right with me.
Too many issues that should have been addressed, weren't.
Also, Gray leapt from being a total playboy, to suddenly only wanting to be with Faith, with not much character or relationship development in between.
It just seemed like instant lust, get the mystery solved, then let's get married.
There was very little exploration of why they should be together.