Crashed

2.5 stars

I received this book for free, this does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review

She’d let her guard down only once. It had destroyed her, breaking her heart into such tiny pieces that she’d never been able to find them all.

Fifth in the Barnes Brothers series, Crashed brings us the last Barnes brother romance. Travis fell in love hard when he was younger and as the story opens up, we get a look at text messages between him and a girl named Isabel that start when they're fifteen. It's a summer romance that grew to more as Isabel's family spends every year at their vacation home by Travis. Through the text messages, readers see Travis and Isabel stay committed to each other even while some looming cloud seems to come from Isabel as she tries to avoid talking about what is really going on with her family. When Travis is eighteen and Isabel turning soon, they come up with a plan to elope and flee to California for awhile, Isabel fearing her father's reaction. Travis knows her father is a U.S. District Attorney and Isabel fears him and has only stayed around to try and protect her younger twin sisters but Isabel has been keeping some important secrets. When an FBI agent lays some harsh facts on Travis but not the full truths, their young love goes up in flames.

If it was the last thing he did in his life, Miles would fix what he’d done to these two.

I haven't read the previous books in the series and I didn't spend a lot of time confused here, you'd just miss out on knowing Travis' brother's love stories; family dynamics get well laid out here and the brothers don't really come into the picture into the latter second half. A few tragic instances befall Isabel, she does talk about rape, losing a baby at birth, and infertility (there's also bullying to other characters) for content warnings. This is a second chance romance with the FBI agent, Miles, trying to fix his mistake of breaking these two apart. He was working a case against Isabel's father, human-trafficking, and Travis gets a bit caught in the cross-fire. On the day he and Isabel were supposed to runaway together, he sees something that has him thinking she's a liar and wasn't serious with him, he feels betrayed and never answers her text or phone calls. Isabel goes through the ringer for awhile, with dealing with the fallout of her father and going into witness protection as she helped give evidence against her father and a personal tormentor of hers named Stephen. A few years after the initial breakup, Miles tries to get these two together but hurts and pains still keep them cold. It isn't until ten years later they have their second chance.

She still loved him. She’d never stopped.

While Isabel went into witness protection and became a foster mom, Travis tries to ease the guilt for how he thinks he betrayed Isabel by going to work for Miles. He starts off working for the government and later as an independent contractor who goes in undercover and helps breakup human trafficking rings. It's a little bit of go along with it as his famous family and his well known face are discussed and how he had plastic surgery to make himself look less like them. When he gets severely injured and Miles sends him to his house on the coast to recuperate, his neighbor turns out to be Isabel. The rest of the story is them looking at each other with their hearts in their eyes and then deciding to get together fairly soon, they have an open door scene around midpoint of book. While there was some of that wonderful angst from the hurtful situations they went through and how their relationship was broken up, I would have liked if it had been gritted out longer. Their relationship almost seemed to take a backseat to Isabel's foster kids' dramas, I almost felt like I knew their characters better than the two that were supposed to be the main couple. The second half also brought in some suspense with a past danger rearing his ugly head and then Travis making up with his family that he had iced out for the last decade.

There just wasn't enough continuous focus on the romantic relationship development for me but the ending did deliver a happily ever after bow ending. If you've been a reader of the series, you'll probably love seeing this last Barnes get his HEA and a possible tease for the series to spin-off with one of Isabel's sisters and an operator friend of Travis.