Last updated on 05/06/2026
Sometimes your past comes back to haunt you…
Anna Martella just wants to move on with her life. But two years after barely surviving a serial killer, she’s not sure she’ll ever be ready to date again. That is, until Matt, her best friend’s brother, who makes her feel safe for the first time in years. Sure, he’s a little mysterious, but everyone has secrets, right?
Matt Roberts can See the past with a single touch. Like his twin sister CJ who Sees the future, he’s spent his life hiding his ability. After a disastrous relationship with someone who used him for his success, he’s sworn off dating. That is, until Anna walks back into his life at his sister’s housewarming party, and suddenly he can’t stay away.
But when the murders start again — young, blond women slain with the same signature as Anna’s attacker — Matt realizes the killer he helped put away had an accomplice. And they’re coming to finish what they started. Now he faces an impossible Does he risk exposing his ability to change Anna’s fate, or does he try to protect her from the shadows? The police suspect him, time is running out, and the woman he loves is in the crosshairs of a killer’s obsession. Will he change her fate or was it always set it stone?
Review:
It’s been a while since I read book 1 ( Last Kiss Under the Mistletoe )–tbh I started re-reading it before picking this one up and was maybe 2 chapters in before going over to GR and realizing I’d already read it. Not because I remembered anything about it in the end, but because I had read dates and had written a full review. So I went into this one pretty much remembering nothing about the first one and did fine–they give you the basic gist of what happened in CJ and Drew’s story so if you want to jump in here you’ll do fine, IMO.
The first 50% or so of the story was really solid–there’s a good deal of insta-relationship here, but the whole fated to be/psychic gifts aspect of their story works to explain that. Matt and Anna are really cute together, and there’s a nice bit of suspense in the secrets that they have in their pasts. As they’re growing closer, Anna starts to sense that she maybe is being watched, and the tension increases even more–all good stuff.
Not that a possible serial killer/copycat killer breaking into her apartment is “good stuff,” but you know what I mean. She temporarily moves in with Matt, and we all know how I feel about forced proximity when there’s only one bed 😉
Then…things take a bit of a turn. I’m 100% willing to go with a “it’s me, not you [the book]” here, because plenty of others seem to be more than OK with the story as a whole. But first Matt makes a *highly* questionable choice when proving his abilities to Anna
spoiler
asking his new girlfriend, who might be in the midst of being targeted by a serial killer for the SECOND TIME, to relive her first trauma for him so he can See it and repeat the experience back to her??? Who does that??? Obviously he’s not a therapist, but surely he knows retraumatizing her isn’t the best idea?and then he *thinks* he finds out something about Anna’s past (with zero actual evidence) and decides that it must be true and he needs to distance himself from her, instead of–work with me here–talking to the woman he supposedly loves about it?
I mean, I can’t even.
Things go a little more off the rails when we get to the big suspenseful last 25% or so–honestly, it reminded me a lot of all of the dozens of Colton-family-themed HQN romantic suspense books I’ve read over the years for Library Journal (which plenty of people love! So if you’re one of them, take everything I’m saying here with the biggest grains of salt ever and pay me no mind), and I had the hardest time taking any of it seriously.
It did have a super cute ending for our MCs once all the drama was over, so there’s that, at least. Personally I would have made Matt do a lot more groveling than Anna did, but I suppose her own latent abilities allowed her to know/believe he was sincere quicker than my non-psychic self would have, so she has a good excuse there.
Rating: 3 stars / C
I voluntarily reviewed an Advance Reader Copy of this book.
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