Rafe by Jo Raven

Rafaele Vestri is as far from ordinary as any single person could possibly be and in this his book we get to see and hear the reason why and believe me if you have an ounce of empathy in you this story will send your emotions into absolute meltdown – this guy is the ultimate in tortured souls and damn does he deserve to feel the way he does, I think I would too.

Blighted – hell, that word is just not enough, he was decimated as a child when is family were murdered before him, he has lived with the knowledge that he has one goal in life to fulfil and he has completely embraced his resolve that nothing will deter him from that mission- to exact revenge on those that plunged him into purgatory when they took his family away.

He is plagued by the obsession that he has to find the man that shrouded his life in a cloak of misery that he is unable to escape from, every waking moment is controlled and his rare moments of sleep are taunted by his nightmares. His sanity is precariously balanced, his reactions are split between being lucid but intense or manic and almost homicidal!

I know the saying tells us that no man is an island but Rafe gives it a darn go… until Megan.

Never having been on the easy side of the street Megan has had more than her fair share of rough times and luckily at the minute she is on the right side of a past that she is praying stays well and truly where it belongs – behind her!

The enigmatic Rafe is a frequent visitor at work and she harbours all sorts of secret fantasies about the dark and brooding man but you don’t stay under the radar by laying your heart on the line so she has always kept her interest under wraps and it appears that she has good reason because he never speaks to her when he is around but for how much longer can not only Megan but Rafe keep their real feelings hidden and continue to keep up the charade of indifference?

The connection between the two of them is fantastically written and beautifully descriptive, they pulled me in to their story and I revelled in it.

Megan was surprisingly a strong and endearing woman, someone that just needed life to cut her a break and then she would peel back the layers that cloak her and show the world how wonderful she is, Rafe on the other hand was a staggeringly beautiful and painfully broken man that no matter what he did I would have loved him anyway. I could forgive him the attitude that he bathed himself in – in fact I think I just found him more alluring.

This is an emotionally beautiful read, it is not what would normally be described as romantic probably but I have to say that romance can be found anywhere and I would class this as one very classy romance with characters that can only be described as kick ass!!