Description: After two years of counseling sessions with Daisy Pendleton, Pastor Jack McReady has earned a permanent spot in her life as a spiritual leader—and nothing more. Jack would never risk losing her trust by exposing the depths of his heart, but he’s hopelessly in love with her.
Daisy loves her southern small-town life and her job at her family-run flower shop, but she doesn’t have the thing she longs for most: someone to share it with. Her recent foray into online dating has been a disaster—until she meets TJ.
Jack could kill his friend Noah for using his initials and some indistinct photos to set up a profile on the dating app Daisy is using. But when he’s finally afforded the opportunity to show her a different side of himself, he’s sucked into the plan before he has time for second thoughts.
Online, Daisy shares some of her greatest fears with TJ, but in person, Jack and Daisy are spending more time together. When a devastating family secret surfaces, Daisy knows that only her trusted friend and counselor can bring her comfort. Jack wants nothing more than to be both men for Daisy, but revealing his secret will prove to be the ultimate test of Daisy’s grace.
My Thoughts: If you had read the other books in this series, then you know that Jack has been in love with Daisy for a long time. Which is obvious to most everyone other than her. And after reading this book, I can't blame her. Despite the amount of time they spend together, both for her counseling sessions and their outings with friends, Jack never speaks to her as though she is anything other than someone he is counseling.
It was not until the midway point, long after he has started talking to her as TJ, that he begins to interact with her as a friend might. He finally starts asking her questions about things that she likes (instead of relying on knowledge he has of her from their sessions) and begins joking around, showing her that there is more to him than the pastor who leads a flock.
At this point however, I was still struggling to want the two of them together because of his lying to her about who he was online. There were a few different points where I thought he was going to finally make it right, but he instead doubled down on the delusion that he was doing nothing wrong by talking to Daisy as TJ. And if he had owned up to his actions at any of those points, allowing the end conflict to be about something else entirely, then I could have been happy with the way this story ended.
There were cute moments. I particularly liked when they started rock climbing together, as it showed that they actually could work as a couple. But even then, I could not understand how she so easily decided that she loved him in the end. Because while he had loved her for a while, she was only just getting to know him as someone other than her pastor, and that while he was lying to her the whole time. Even allowing for the story's theme of forgiveness, he should not have been able to so easily get with her in the end.
I have provided an honest review after having received a copy of the book from the publisher.
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