Amanda O'Leary and her orphaned children are happily settling into the small but comfortable house built for them by the congregation at Caleb's church, and Caleb decides to act on their simmering mutual attraction. He sees her as Sleeping Beauty, going through the motions of life but not emotionally connected to anyone, and he wants to be the one to wake her up. Complicating matters, her once-adored father, Big Max, who has vociferously disapproved of her choice of husband, is now suffering from accelerated Alzheimer's and desperately wants to reinstate Amanda and her family in his life, but forbids Caleb to share details of his condition with anyone, putting Caleb in an untenable position. Woods has invested the final installment of her Charleston-set contemporary romance series, following The Backup Plan (2005) and Flirting with Disaster (2005), with charm and pathos, drawing heavily on the appeal of this gracious Southern city while unhesitatingly revealing its lingering racial tensions and class consciousness.
