When love simmers between a
reclusive scientist and a wealthy debutante, will they abandon ship or is it
full steam ahead?
Nicole Renard returns
home to Galveston, Texas, to find her father deathly ill. Though she loves him,
Nicole’s father has always focused on what she’s not. Not male. Not married.
Not able to run Renard shipping.
Vowing to find a
suitable husband to give her father the heir he desires before it’s too late,
Nicole sets out with the Renard family’s greatest treasure as her dowry: the
highly coveted Lafitte Dagger. But her father’s rivals come after the dagger,
forcing a change in Nicole’s plans.
After a boiler
explosion aboard the Louisiana nearly
took his life, Darius Thornton has been a man obsessed. He will do anything to
stop even one more steamship disaster. Even if it means letting a female secretary
into his secluded world.
Nicole is determined
not to let her odd employer scare her off with his explosive experiments, yet
when respect and mutual attraction grow between them, a new fear arises. How
can she acquire an heir for her father when her heart belongs to another? And
when her father’s rivals discover her hiding place, will she have to choose
between that love and her family’s legacy?
Full Steam Ahead
is one of Karen Witemyer’s stand-alone novels that I have been meaning to read
for quite some time, especially since I found it at a local bookstore for a
really great price a while back. It’s been sitting on my bookshelf begging to
be read ever since, but somehow I just never got around to reading it. Until
now. And let me say I don’t know what took me so long, because this book is
absolutely fantastic and I couldn’t get tired of it if I read it every single
week for a whole year. I’m serious. It’s that good. If I’m completely honest, I
think it might be one of my favorite books that Karen has ever written.
Nicole Renard is such a fantastic character! I am fairly
positive that if things were different and it were possible, we would have been
the best of friends. She is so brave, so courageous, and has so much spitfire,
that I couldn’t help but love her from the start. I immediately felt for her,
as I’m a Daddy’s girl myself and would hate knowing that my father was always
disappointed in the fact that I’m not a boy, so that also helped me bond with
her, and helped me get behind her cause when it came to the decisions she had
to make in order to procure her father the heir he wanted. She captured my heart
from the very first page, and I couldn’t help but devour her story, and the
story of someone else who captured my affections.
Darius Thornton. Oh. My. Word. I’m utterly speechless. There
are no words to describe how completely and utterly perfect he is. Yes, he
makes mistakes, and yes, he can be a bear sometimes, but he is so sweet, and so
funny, and so honestly himself, and I couldn’t help but love him the moment I met
him. I knew from the start that he was perfect for Nicole, and once they
started to see that for themselves, I couldn’t help but melt my way through the
rest of the story. They were so sweet
together that I ended up in a little puddle on the floor by the time it was
over, and I already wanted to read this novel again.
All in all, as if you couldn’t already tell, I really loved this novel. I’m so, so glad
I own this book, and I can promise you I won’t wait long before reading it
again, definitely not as long as it took me to finally read it the first time. I’m
already making plans to lend this book to my best friend, and then who knows
who I’ll lend it to after that! All I know is, I can’t imagine not giving this
book all five bookshelves and a place on my all-time favorites list, and I would
definitely recommend it as a fabulous book to read!
Happy reading!
To see where I’m linking up, check out my Where I Party
page.
All credit for the italicized synopsis goes to Karen
Witemeyer and Bethany House Publishers.
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