Count On Forever (Lacey Bros)

Review of an advance copy received from author

Wow! A big example of reconciliation that finds its own timing. A small-town love that was once wilted, but then slowly grows again 18 years later.

Millie Donovan and Shaw Lacey used to be friends, best friends, and then high school sweethearts. Millie’s childhood was spent on the Lacey family farm because of her dysfunctional mom. Since Shaw and Millie technically grew up together, both of them developed such a deep, serious love that Shaw even proposed to her when they were only nineteen years old.

Unfortunately, that love had to be broken and scattered everywhere.

Something forced Millie to run away, leaving the small town of Holly Holler, leaving Shaw all alone, seemingly disrespecting the Laceys, a family who had done everything they could to nurture her. Or let’s just say raise her. Don’t you think so?

But running was the safest option Millie knew at nineteen, after the most heartbreaking response from her dad to the kindness of the Lacey family.

And meanwhile, anger becomes the only way Shaw knows how to bury the love he still has for his former fiancée eighteen years later.

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You’ll already know this is a second chance romance. It revolves around sweet young love, heartbreak, separation, and then the reunion readers can probably see coming from miles away. It’s predictable.

What’s much rarer to witness is actually the stronger love standing right beside Millie and Shaw’s romance. The nurturing love from an entire family who had absolutely nothing to do with Millie’s mom’s abandonment… yet chose to love and raise her anyway.

I completely agree with the author’s description of this as a once-in-a-lifetime love. Not only because Shaw and Millie still love each other after eighteen years apart. I repeat, not only because of that.

But think about this.

How often do you see an entire rich family opening their hearts so completely to a girl who isn’t related to them by blood at all?

That feels like a once-in-a-lifetime kind of love.

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“I wish on every star I find in the blackness: Please give me the strength to do this.”

This line comes right before Millie decides to return her engagement ring and leave Holly Holler. This line actually broke me. Just one wish, yet it sent tears down my cheeks because I already knew what that decision would cost both of them. And trust me, this book has many more moments like this.

There are also plenty of childhood flashbacks that made me smile sheepishly, as if I were growing up alongside Millie and Shaw myself.

But please watch out for the painful parts. Keep a box of tissues beside you.