REVIEWED BY CINDY
TITLE: Wounded Hearts 
AUTHOR: Remmy Duchene and BL Morticia
PUBLISHER: Dreamspinner Press
LENGTH: 252 Pages
Blurb:
Zane Ashford’s stint in the NYPD comes to an abrupt halt when he is injured in the line of duty. After waking up partially blind in one eye, all he wants to do is crawl into a hole, but his friends and family won’t leave him alone. Reluctantly, he lets his best friend talk him into time away on a ranch in Montana. But the moment he gets there and meets Cyrus Abrams, Zane begins to contemplate murder.
Cyrus Abrams is vulgar, ornery, stuck in his ways, and not about to change for anyone, no matter how good Zane Ashford looks in those jeans. The more they lock horns, the more Cyrus begins to see Zane in a whole new light. But Cyrus has a past, one that left him in big trouble and more broken than he cares to admit—a past no one told Zane about. Cyrus fears that when Zane finds out, everything will come to a screeching halt.
Review:
A story about a cop and a cowboy with angst, sweet-hot sex and an interesting premise sounded perfect for me. But, it turned out to be not so much.
Zane is a man whose whole world got turned up-side down in an instant. Everything he thought he was is thrown into question when he’s injured on the job and he flees to the country for some much-needed downtime.
Cyrus knows all about having your world torn apart. It’s turned him cynical and all he sees in other men is a one night stand.
I really wanted to love these characters. Men who are bent from the harshness of life but not broken and I wanted to watch them find their way to each other so they could heal.
I struggled with it from the beginning though. There just seemed to be no smooth flow at all. The dialogue feels stunted and clunky throughout the whole book for me and it threw me right off. It was like trying to read while driving down a gravel road. You feel bumped around and distracted from the story the authors were trying to tell.
The plot-line itself is interesting. I wanted to know more about Cyrus and his past relationship and I would have loved to see more interaction between Zane and his sister and niece. They both came across as good men who found themselves being controlled by events that they had very little control over.
The side characters were a mixed bag. I never did quite get a bead on Renford. He was a good friend to both men and I would have liked to have gotten to know him better. Zane’s sister Cecily came across as a little arrogant but also as someone who loves her brother a lot.
Brian came across as almost a caricature than a real character. I think he was supposed to be there for comic elements but I honestly just found him irritating and winced whenever he entered the scene.
I mostly just had a hard time dealing with the back-and-forth between the characters. Neither one could make up their mind about where they wanted things to go and maybe they needed to have more conversations and less sex to work things out. I know this is a romance novel, but really, talking can be sexy too!
In the end I’m give this story a 3 heart rating because I think the story itself is enough to keep most people satisfied and while it didn’t live up to it’s potential for me, it’s a good “rainy afternoon, curled up on the couch” read that will appeal to many.
Rating: 
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