Eclipse Bay Book

[
The biggest problem with this book is the heroine. She's an annoying, prissy, judgmental, lecturing, hypocritical PRUDE who blows hot and cold with the hero, jerking him around like a plaything. There was seriously nothing likeable about her and I didn't understand why the hero was such a lovesick puppy dog over her. Their romance wavered back and forth between boring, confusing and pathetic and I didn't care one bit whether they got together in the end.

And the constant, CONSTANT, stating and restating of the family names was sooooo annoying. Every single scene, every single conversation, everything the hero and heroine did was linked back to their family. "I'm a Harte/Madison, everyone knows we always/never…" JAK seriously tried to make the family names their entire identity. Which was really lame because there was nothing especially interesting about either family. The "feud" that was touted on the back of the book was completely nonexistent. Neither family seemed to care about the other at all, let alone be "feuding" with them.

Okay, the story starts off great. Hannah Harte is on a date with a guy named Perry. On paper he's an appropriate date for her illustrious rich self since he's from a good family and is going to college, etc. etc. But in person he turns out to be a sexual predator who tries to force himself on the 20-year-old Hannah when she won't put out on their date. He ends up leaving her stranded on an isolated road more than a half hour's walk from her house. Lucky for her, Rafe was also kicked out of the car and abandoned by his own date when he told her he wasn't interested in being one of the legion of men she was sleeping around with.

Rafe is the town bad boy. One of those ne'er-do-well Madisons who will never amount to anything. He rides a motorcycle and hangs out at the local adult books store and everyone is sure it's only a matter of time before he winds up in jail. But Rafe is a perfect gentleman to Hannah and just makes sure she gets home safely. As they walk, they chat about their respective love lives and futures. Hannah reveals that she's got a long list of requirements for her Mr. Right and rattles off about a dozen things. Then she natters on about her big plans for the future. Rafe, on the other hand, says that his only career goal is to not end up in prison.

This scene was poignant and sad because you really felt for Rafe. It was clear from what he said that dealing with the town's negative opinion of him all his life had hurt. That he'd been told so often that he'd never amount to anything and didn't deserve anything good, that he kind of believed it. It was obvious that he liked Hannah on a level deeper than just superficial attraction. It was like he thought of her as a pure, virgin princess while he was the dirty peasant not worth of being with her. And when she rattled off her list of Mr. Right requirements, it just depressed him because he knew he'd never meet her standards.

Unfortunately, as much as I felt for Rafe in this scene, it doesn't actually stand up once you read the rest of the book because, as I said, the supposed feud and the town's alleged negative opinions of the Madisons are bunk. The only real scandal in the Madisons' past was that Rafe's grandfather had been married and divorced 4 times. I'm not seeing what's so allegedly sinister about that. It's not like anyone in Rafe's family was a criminal. So…where's the supposed negativity the town feels towards the Madisons coming from? I didn't get it. We're TOLD that the town has always treated Rafe as if he's a bad seed, but we're never really shown any examples of that or justifications for why the town would behave that way. And seriously, if things were all THAT bad for the Madisons in Eclipse Bay, why the heck didn't the grandfather move him and the boys away?

So this "Poor Rafe's been unjustly maligned his whole life" thing that stirred up my sympathies in the beginning of the book felt really unjustified by the time I got to the end, which sort of ruins this scene for me. Honestly, the only negativity I saw directed toward him could just as easily been the result of him deliberately cultivating his bad boy, rebel without a cause image. But no, JAK constantly tries to bash us over the head with empty, unsupported exposition insisting that the whole town is against Rafe because he's a Madison.

During their walk Hannah lectures Rafe on how he should have more ambitions for himself than just staying out of jail. She never says anything nice to Rafe during this unsolicited sermon, she just says that it's stupid for him to not plan to go to college or whatever and says that he should "get a life." If she'd actually told Rafe that she thought he was better than his reputation. That she saw the smart, sensitive guy underneath and believed in him, that would have been so much better and would have had a much more profoundly positive impact on him. Instead she comes off as a snobby know-it-all who's schooling the dumb-dumb on life.

The next morning, Hannah wakes up to the sounds of her parents arguing with the town sheriff. Rafe's ex-girlfriend's body was found that morning and Rafe is their number one suspect. Hannah does the right thing and vouches for the fact that Rafe was with her during the murder. And that was apparently the end of things because the chapter cuts out here and we pick up 8 years later.

We're told that in the aftermath of the murder, life was tough for Hannah because the gossip about her and Rafe went through the town like wildfire. Some people still assumed that Rafe had killed the ex-girlfriend and that he'd then seduced Hannah as an alibi. Others just occupied themselves with speculating that Rafe and Hannah had sex on the beach that night. But again, this all felt very hollow in terms of character and plot development because Hannah is totally fine. She weathered the storm of the town's gossip and came out the other side being exactly the same person she'd been beforehand. This could have been a chance for her to grow and see how tough life had been for Rafe, growing up with everyone in town just waiting to pounce on any infraction and say "I always knew he was no good," but no, Hannah doesn't have that epiphany. No emotional growth on her part at all.

We pick up the story with Hannah learning that her aunt - who always liked Rafe and frequently talked about how romantic it would be for Rafe and Hannah to end up together a la Romeo and Juliet - has died and left a huge mansion to both of them. Neither one can use 50% of a house and both have a dream of turning it into a business, Rafe a restaurant and Hannah an inn, so neither wants to sell out. Underneath Rafe's restaurant dreams, however, is his still-strong desire to have Hannah. He wants to use this house situation as a way of getting close to her. In the time since they last met, he's become rich through day-trading, been married and divorced, and become a master-level chef. Hannah, meanwhile, has been running a successful wedding planner business and been engaged but was ultimately dumped shortly before the wedding (which makes her ex-fiancé the smartest one in the book).

The rest of the plot is pretty boring, especially on the romance front. Rafe keeps trying to put the moves on Hannah but she seems completely immune to him. She's uptight and prim most of the time, but sometimes she turns into this sex-crazed wild woman for a few seconds only to immediately switch back to being an ice queen. Early in the book Rafe kisses her and they start making out. She's super into it but then gets distracted by her dog and calls a halt to things. This had more to do with JAK's tired old romance formula than anything the characters were feeling. Rule #1 is that the happy couple cannot have sex the first time they make out. Any contrived reason will do to break up the moment, even a dog walking by.

So Hannah stops the make-out session and then spends the next few chapters being completely indifferent to Rafe. Then Perry shows up. Rafe had spent the night at Hannah's house (on the couch) for various contrived reasons and Perry arrives at 9:00 in the morning so most people would assume Hannah and Rafe were in a relationship. But Perry is one of those pompous jerks who is completely convinced of his superiority in all things so he not only dismisses Rafe as a potential rival for Hannah's affections, he also confidently invites her to come to a political function the next day. Hannah asks a few questions and then accepts the invitation without cluing the readers in on why. Perry then arrogantly says that he'll be far too busy to pick her up but he's sure she can find her way on her own.

Rafe is a experiencing a rather sad mixture of disappointment, anger and low self-esteem. He thinks Perry is a jerk (which is kind of understating it for an attempted rapist) but sees Hannah's acceptance of Perry's invitation as a sign that she's still into men who meet her list of qualities, which Rafe himself obviously doesn't meet and never will. Coming on the heels of her rejection of him during their make-out session, he's not feeling very confident.

Hannah basically orders Rafe to go to the party with her as her date. When Rafe says that he thinks Perry is under the impression that she's going to be his date, she scoffs and says that Perry couldn't even be bothered to pick her up. At the party we come in on Rafe standing on the sidelines watching Hannah and Perry dance together. Perry seems disgruntled, which makes Rafe feel a bit better about the situation. He chats amiably with Jed, the owner of the local paper and someone Rafe knew passingly in the old days. Eventually a dot-com billionaire comes on the scene and we find out that Hannah knows him because she organized his wedding. A friend of Hannah's has been trying to get a job at the institute Perry works for but Perry has been blocking him. So Hannah uses her relationship with the billionaire to force Perry to stop blocking her friend. That's why she agreed to come to this event. Perry corners her and is super-pissed about the whole thing. Things devolve as the incident 8 years ago is brought up and Hannah accuses him of attempted rape while Perry says she's a c*ck teasing prude who's too repressed to behave like a normal woman. He ends up grabbing her and finally Rafe, who'd been watching from the shadows, steps in to tell Perry to keep his hands to himself or else. Perry threatens to have Rafe arrested if he lays a hand on him and Hannah pulls Rafe away before things get violent. It was all kind of disappointing. In the car on the ride home Hannah has come down from the temporary high she felt at getting one over on Perry and now she's worried that by making him so angry, he'll make her friend's life a living hell at the institute…which he probably will. And Rafe isn't much better in his inner monologue thoughts since he's not planning some uber-alpha way of ensuring that his woman's attempted rapist is brought to heel. Lame.

They go back to the mansion and one thing leads to another. Suddenly Hannah and Rafe are so hot for each other that they can hardly make it up the stairs to the bedroom. They have a typical JAK sex scene where the woman is taken care of beforehand and the man lasts 5 seconds after penetration. A few hours later, Hannah wakes up as the ice queen again. She completely freaks out about them having slept together. Suddenly she's worried that Rafe is playing her, trying to work some kind of angle to get the mansion all to himself. He sees her freaking out and asks what's gone wrong, then when she asks if he's playing her, he turns it around on her. He asks if she even planned to call him in the morning or if she was just using him, first to stick it to Perry by taking him as a date, and then as a convenient bed partner. She ends up running from the house like a ninny.

The next morning she waits until 10:00 to call him so she won't seem so eager. Rafe answers sounding distracted but when he realizes it's her, he calls her honey and says that he's a little busy overseeing the local handy men. She freaks out that he's having work done on the mansion without her consent and goes flying over to scream at him, saying that she KNEW last night had been all about the house for him. He says that they both want to turn the mansion into a business, so it doesn't hurt anything to have the wiring and such inspected. Then Rafe asks if she wants to go partners on the business venture. He'll run the restaurant and she'll run the inn. Hannah basically spits on this idea and again accuses him of sleeping with her for ulterior motives. She ends up stomping off, but before she leaves, the chatty workmen mention that they once did a job at Rafe's dead ex-girlfriend's house and found a secret stash of women's underwear and shoes that were in a man's size. There were also a bunch of video tapes, though they don't know what was on them.

This gets Hannah and Rafe thinking that the ex-girlfriend might have been murdered by someone she was trying to blackmail so they start investigating. They end up going to see the porn shop owner, figuring that if anyone knew about a local with these kinds of tendencies, it would be him. Hannah is a total stuck-up prude about this whole storyline. She makes it clear that any man who enjoys cross-dressing is a sexual deviant and that anyone who frequents a porn shop is a pathetic degenerate. She can barely even bring herself to be civil to the shop owner and very much looks down on Rafe for having spent some of his youth in the store. I really hated Hannah and her sanctimonious moralizing in this scene, especially since it came right on the heels of her having sex with Rafe. It just really demonstrated that she didn't think he was good enough for her. They part ways with their relationship somewhat strained.

Then Hannah goes home and finds her dog missing. She follows the sound of his barking and ends up finding him on a rocky outcropping on the beach, locked in a cage and in the path of the incoming tide. Someone had deliberately left him to drown. She rescues him, but then the dog alerts her to the fact that someone is lurking in the shadowy night so she panics and runs to a convenient cave she knew from her childhood. She emerges from the other side to find Rafe frantically calling for her and she runs straight into his arms. Rafe spends another night on the couch for her protection.

The next day, they have Rafe's grandfather over for dinner because Hannah had pushed Rafe to invite him to repair the two men's strained relationship. As Rafe is preparing the food, he's suddenly overcome with emotion about Hannah's brush with death the night before. He recants to the readers how when he first arrived at her house to find her car in the driveway but her not answering the door, he'd thought that "the worst had happened" and she was upstairs having sex with another man. Then when he'd realized the dog wasn't barking and it was an odd time for a walk, he'd become concerned. Now he's come to the conclusion that the dog may not have been the villain's ultimate target. If Hannah had arrived home later, the tide would have been higher and rescuing the dog would have been much more dangerous. The idea of Hannah dying practically brings Rafe to his knees.

Then he carries the hors d'oeurves in to Hannah and his grandfather he hears them talking. The grandfather is assuring Hannah that Rafe will "do right by her." When Hannah asks what he means, he says that he'll see to it that Rafe offers to marry her because "shacking up" with a woman like her just isn't done. He goes on to say that Rafe just has a phobia of marriage because he's been divorced. Things go downhill from there as Hannah doesn't say a single thing to even hint that she feels anything romantic for Rafe, or that she thinks he's a good person in general, and instead just gets haughty about the grandfather's use of the term, "shacking up." Eventually the grandfather mentions that he'd always known that Rafe didn't kill the ex-girlfriend. Rafe has been standing frozen in the doorway the whole time they've been discussing him and gets a bit emotional over this declaration. Apparently he was never sure if his grandfather believed him.

Moving on, Rafe eventually convinces Hannah to move into the mansion with him for her protection but she makes a big stink about insisting that she have her own bedroom because they are NOT shacking up. They also find out that it's the town politician who wore the ladies underwear in the ex-girlfriend's house. But the politician and all the movers and shakers in town had been at a function at the institute the night of the murder so it can't have been him that killed her.

Rafe and Hannah have sex again and again Hannah acts like an ice queen afterwards. There's a bit of an argument where Hannah says that he'd never have been with her when they were younger because she wasn't his type. He denies it and say he was desperate for her back then but knew he didn't meet her stupid list of requirements. She says that's not true, that she'd had a crush on him, all the girls in town had because he was so handsome and dangerous with his motorcycle and leather jacket. He says that it's not exactly a compliment that everyone thought of him as the kind of guy they'd like to have a dirty little affair with but never bring home to their family. A bit later they're driving in the car and stop for gas. A bunch of the local people happen by and all start making comments about how Rafe and Hannah are "shacking up." Hannah goes ballistic and screams at all of them like a crazy woman. Insisting that she and Rafe are merely cohabitating in the mansion because they both own half, they are NOT in a relationship. Things take a weird turn when Rafe says that they ARE in a relationship and she says he's never given any indication that he wanted a future with her. He then inexplicably says that he wants to marry her, which she takes offense to because she doesn't think it's a real or appropriate proposal.

Arizona Snow makes her usual crazy appearance to provide a log of all the people who were at the institute the night of the murder and who left early. They eventually figure out that the villain is Jed, the owner of the paper. Rafe goes to his house to confront him and finds that he's packed up and left in a hurry. Back with Hannah, they're walking along the beach when the dog starts barking and alerts them to the fact that the mansion is on fire. They get back in time to see Jed making a run for it. Hannah calls 9-1-1 while Rafe tackles Jed. He's led away by the cops saying that he had "everything set" and had been about to make his move but then they'd ruined everything by coming back to town. We don't really get an explanation for why he'd waited 8 years to make whatever move he'd been planning but who really cares.

Rafe and Hannah then declare their love for each other even though Hannah hasn't demonstrated a single ounce of affection for him and he should be running as far and as fast as he can away from her shrill, hypocritical moralizing.
(hide spoiler)]