Overall I enjoyed this story. Clare was an admirable heroine, trying to keep her child safe. Just how she'd ended up Wife # 7 (or some such nonsense) of middle eastern royalty was plausible enough ... as was how she'd managed to escape.

Josh was a well-developed character as well. His issues with PTSD and reluctance to get involved with a woman were credible enough on that grounds alone. The whole 'magic/curse' subplot, however, just didn't work for me which is why I only gave it 3 stars. Not that magic ran in their family ... just the whole '3 kids accept great-grandma's curse'. Once you get into the whole 'magic' universe, three magical siblings could have easily engineered a 'kharmic reversal spell' or something to zing the old biddy with her own mojo. Under the right circumstances, magic could have worked. Here ... it fell flat. It felt like a Wikipedia citation of magic because paranormal romance is suddenly now a hot topic. If you want to research magic, speak to a real practitioner of the art.

Ironically... once you finally got a glimpse of great-grandma at the end ... she was intriguing. I won't spoil it, but how great-grandma finally 'helped' was the first 'credible' piece of magic in the story.

I will probably read the other two books in this series, despite the silliness of the magic, because the characters and main plots were basically sound and I'm hoping the author does more research to make the magical underpinnings more sound. Otherwise, the story would have worked better for me with magic totally absent. ( )