El Hombre Que Lo Arriesgo Todo (2013) - Plot & Excerpts
‘I am still quite desperately in love with you. Is that open enough for you?’‘Loving you, anima mia, meant losing the ability to focus for long on anything without thinking about you. It meant checking the phone a hundred times a day in case you’d called. It meant walking into a room and searching it in case you might be there, and waking in the middle of the night with your name on my lips and your perfume in my nose and the taste—Dio,’ he husked, ‘the taste of you on my tongue. It meant I was lonely in a crowd of people. It was the joke I laughed at while I was crying inside, and the nagging ache that constantly dogged me low down in my gut, always there, driving me insane—yet the hell of it was I never wanted it to go away.’'Loving you was wishing, and hating myself for wishing, and wanting you so badly.' Estranged wife of 3.5years gets a call from her father-in-law that Hero is in the hospital due to a severe boating accident & that he needs her. She only planned to be there very briefly but circumstances prolong her stay. She goes with him to help him recuperate in their old home where she has lots of bad memories of their marriage. But Hero seems to have a change of heart re: their marriage & they try to sort things out to give their marriage another chance. Can they work through their past betrayals?As much as Reid does write well, Hero & heroine were such poor characters & the resolution of their many past betrayals were very unsatisfactory that this book left me wanting…mostly wanting to smack both main characters upside the head. Hero needed to grovel A LOT for his past misdeeds towards heroine & heroine needed more self-respect & gumption.------------------------SPOILERS-------------------------------------Hero’s betrayals towards heroine:1. Hero instantly believed his best friend(BFF) who told him that heroine had sex with him while Hero was away. He never asked heroine about it and held off telling her what he knew until the end of the book.2. Hero bet his friends that she would have sex with him & a video shows him proudly accepting his winnings (he knew he was being videotaped & was ok with it b/c he wanted heroine to see it as revenge for supposedly having slept with his BFF)3. Hero married her b/c she got pregnant (even though he wasn’t sure it was his) and made her suffer for 4 months of his coldness as her husband before they separated. 4. Hero doubted the baby she carried was his & treated her pregnancy with indifference & her miscarriage with relief. His resolution? Seducing & manipulating heroine to give their marriage another try. He waited until the end to finally tell her what his BFF confessed to him about lying about their affair. He ducked & ignored talking openly about how he betrayed her. She did most of the talking & he basically just seduced her. He didn’t even talk about his regret re: all the time wasted b/c he believed his BFF and didn’t give her a chance to defend herself. Nor did he talk about regretting how he doubted their baby’s paternity and his indifference re: their stillborn baby. He may have realized how wrong he was to believe his BFF and treating her coldly during their marriage. But he was still a selfish, clueless, and irresponsible man. I think he grew up a little bit & realized he was ready to settle down, especially after his BFF confessed about his big lie. I never got the sense that Hero’s efforts to reunite with heroine was based on a deep & abiding love for her. What’s even more unfortunate was that heroine was ok with this lack of his. She may have changed & grown to be less doormatty & stupid when it came to him. But she did most of the talking & accepted his assenting to what he did in the past as his apology. She gave in to him so easily as if she was just looking for a crumb (or what looked like a crumb) of compromise re: the past in order for her to take him back again. These 2 have a shaky future.Barely recommended.
What do You think about El Hombre Que Lo Arriesgo Todo (2013)?
An intense passionate read about misunderstandings & a second chance at love.
—rikasse
damn what a good read, absolutely loved it
—Heatherk573
