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Single father and dean at Kensington State University, Mac Caldwell grows restless. His career success isn’t enough. Sharing custody doesn’t cut it. He needs a woman in his life and his son with him full time.
Pacing by his office window, he spies a pretty woman alone on a bench. He’s never seen her before. He’s intrigued, who is she? Fate takes a hand when she turns up as the new worker in his office.
He’s attracted to the sweet and sexy Callie Richards, but can he trust her with his heart? As their friendship grows, so does the threat of a campus drug ring. Can Mac and Callie flush out the gang killing students with bad drugs?
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REVIEWS
Beautiful, September 12, 2015Joachim brings in the romance we all know and love. A romance where love conquers all and can withstand just about anything. I loved Mac and Callie’s story about their hardship and their courage to continue. I loved the interaction between Callie and Mac’s son. From start to finish you are rooting for these characters and don’t want to put the book down. Joachim always writes great stories of love and passion. Stories like these teach us that love is stronger than anything else. Those who love contemporary romance will love this book!
LINK: http://thepenmuse.net/?p=3721
After getting a chance to explore the writings of Jean Joachim with the introduction to Now and Forever: Callie’s story, I found myself HAVING to buy this book! When I read the prelude to this series I couldn’t stop crying at the REAL life events that unfolded and I HAD to read the next book to find out what happened to Callie and if she is able to move forward and have a normal existence.
Callie was crushed from the loss of her fiances death and after two years of barely living she is forced into moving on by all that love her. She returned to college and worked in the office to help her with some of the college expenses. There she met Mac, the colleges dean, and began a very slow relationship that thrived. Mac has a son and Callie began to babysit Jason while Mac was working late. Trying to fight their growing affection toward one another finally turns into a full on sweet romance. The stuff that happens in “real life” and you can put yourself in her shoes.
There is lust, a murder, some drugs on the college campus, more murder and a serious twist that I did NOT see coming. I really did enjoy this story and the prequel to it….it is a very sweet story that I had to read in 1 day!!! I couldn’t put it down!
True love can surviveDecember 4, 2011
Two years after Callie lost her fiancé Kyle to the war taking place in Iraq, she decides to try and move on with her life. She is now attending Kensington State University to get her masters. Callie starts working in the administrative office where Mac happens to work and is the dean of the school. Mac is a single parent with a 2-year-old son named Jason. Working together both Mac and Callie will try to fight an attraction for each other, which will later turn into to an affair and a marriage proposal. While they are still getting to know each other, they have to get through Callie’s past, Audrey, Mac’s ex wife, illegal drugs on campus and death.
I have to admit, before reading the book I sort of had an idea how this book would turn out based on the title, but I was caught off guard. The book was an unexpected surprise for me and I really enjoyed it. The main story of the book is the love story involving Mac and Callie. However, so many unexpected twists vamped up the story for me.
There was the issue with Callie’s past and Mac feeling as if he is competing with Kyle’s ghost. We have the draining and annoying ex wife Audrey, which I have to say I was surprised by what she was plotting and what she did towards the end. Then we have someone trying to kill Callie that is connected to the illegal drug ring going on at the campus. I was so very shock to find out who was behind the drug ring; I never saw that coming, wow. All this leads up to a good read. If you are looking for a nice, sweet, light romance with a plot and twist then this is your read. If you are into the hardcore erotica then this will not be your sort of read.
PS: I love the song Unchained Melody by the Righteous brothers, Callie and Mac’s first dancewas to this song *sighing*. I actually played that song after I finish reading.
At the very beginning, the heart of this book exudes a sort of melancholy feeling. Callie is dealing with the grief from the death of her fiance. We learn a lot about her childhood and the things that she had to go through as she was growing up. Her childhood was not an easy or happy one. Consequently, it seemed and felt to her like Kyle was all she had. When he died, she was devastated. In the midst of the grief, she has decided that it’s time to move on with her life, but she still has trouble letting go of Kyle.
Callie is a quiet girl that stays to herself. She is believable in her grief and the way she relives things, not wanting to let them go and afraid she will forget. I enjoyed her as a character, as I did most of the characters from this book. Mac is just trying to deal with his life, not really looking to get involved with anyone. The fact that it is a relationship that is not sought out by either party seems to make the feelings more real.
The biggest problem I had with this book is only that the author did such a fantastic job of making Kyle such a great guy, to make him worthy of the level of grief Callie was feeling even after such a long time (I’m assuming), that by the time I met Mac I didn’t care about him. I wanted Kyle! Even after a few chapters of Callie and Mac, and even rooting for them to get together on one level, I found myself still hoping that the military made a mistake and Kyle would come walking in. I will say that Callie’s relationship with Mac was probably healthier. She had grown and matured a little more by the time she got involved with him, so he wasn’t her entire life the way Kyle was. She was more her own person by this time, with her own identity.
The different things that are dealt with in this book are portrayed very well and realistically. The levels of grief, trying to move on without forgetting, becoming your own, independent person apart from the grief and the person that you are grieving are all a part of the story, but not overwhelmingly so. I loved the box of Kyle’s things that Callie keeps, and Mac’s reaction to it when he finds it. I could see myself doing something like that in Callie’s place.
A very bittersweet love story that will take you through the whole spectrum of emotions. I found myself proud of Callie by the end, as though she was a friend I knew, rather than a character in a book. This is a great read – another win for Ms. Joachim.
Webb Weaver
This lovely story is the anatomy of a love relationship between two injured people and how they manage to withstand many obstacles to be truly happy. There is also a suspenseful underone as the couple gets involved in solving a mystery on campus.
The characters are unique and interesting and the writing is sweet and easy to read. Jean C. Joachim’s first fiction work is everything a love story should be, and more. Delightfully genuine and engrossing to read, Now and Forever, a Love Story is exactly that…a love story, but with some thrills thrown in for good measure. This book has all the trials and tribulations, and love and romance, that anyone could want in a great read. I’m giving Now and Forever, a Love Story, a 5 spider rating and recommending this book to those of you who enjoy reading a love story or a something with a little suspense. How sweet is that…?
T Lane
4 STAR REVIEW!
“…This is a well-written and enjoyable love story with some suspenseful moments. It is really not a suspense story persay, but the love story is excellent. The author has created two very strong characters who have overcome adversity, and an excellent plot that grabs the reader’s interest and holds it to the end. The subplot of the drug sting is an interesting aside that helps to tie up some loose ends in addition to providing a suspenseful interlude. Mac and Callie’s story is an emotional one that I really enjoyed.”
Maura
Reviewer for Coffee Time Romance & More
MY BOOK BINGE REVIEWS
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Review: Now and Forever A Love Story by Jean C. Joachim
This is the inaugural fictional work of Ms Joachim who is a published author in the non-fiction field. It is a story of a hurting, grieving young woman who has lost her best friend and fiance in the war in the Middle East. He had been her friend and support during the dark days after her parents’ death when she was sixteen. Their friendship had grown into love and they were planning to be married after this final deployment overseas, a tour of duty from which he never returned.
Now Callie Richards is 26 years old, having grieved for two long and lonely years, and she has decided that she needs to complete her post-graduate education at a New York university. Taking part of the insurance money she had received from Kyle’s estate, she embarks on what she hopes will be a new start in her life. She is really broke, barely has enough money to live and only if she misses a few meals during the week. She takes a part-time job in the university’s administrative office where she comes in contact with the two academic deans and the president of the school. One of those deans is Mac Caldwell, a 34-year-old divorced father of a toddler who is also lonely and discouraged about the sad state of things with his personal life.
Mac’s first marriage had occurred when his girlfriend became pregnant and Mac felt compelled to marry her. Now they are divorced and she is difficult to deal with over the custody issues. She has taken to dropping off their son a day early, causing considerable difficulty for Mac with his work load, academic appointments, and class schedule. Callie offers to babysit in light of her former work experience in daycare centers and private babysitting. When this situation becomes a weekly thing, Mac and Callie become friends and eventually lovers.
It is now that Callie faces the need to let Kyle go and move on, and in Mac she believes she has found the man who can fill her heart and her life. Mac is a man who finds it difficult to express his feelings but he comes to know that Callie is a woman who has depth, maturity, and a compassionate heart. He knows that no matter what her former relationships may have been, he cannot even imagine his life without her. Her relationship with his son is also evidence of her ability to open her heart to anyone, even a child who is not her own.
This is a very nice novel that is really the “biography” of a relationship, one that began with pain and disappointment for both Callie and Mac but which blossomed into passion and love. It is also a novel that has a suspense strand as Callie and Mac both get involved in trying to solve the mystery of who is bringing drugs onto the campus. There are some surprises–actually big surprises–in the resolution of this mystery. There are definitely some significant stresses on Callie and Mac’s marriage that involve the ex-wife, custody issues over Mac’s son, some residual concerns on Mac’s part over Callie’s former love, the stress of Callie’s class projects as she seeks to finish her master’s degree, and the pressure that is upon Mac to fulfill his administrative responsbilities; but that is all part of this story of a relationship. Only in fairy tales do love relationships go smoothly. It is also a story of how both Callie and Mac must make some important personal decisions about how they will open themselves to one another, grow in their relationship, and allow room for each to be who they are. There is kindness, friendship, genuine caring and authentic loving here–the kind that is capable of withstanding the ups and downs that two people must endure as they are finding that easy place with one another.
I liked the people in this story–other than the bad guy’s, of course. They were real and could have easily inhabited a modern university. They sounded very much like people we all know. Certainly the circle of support they formed around Callie as she was growing into her role as Mac’s wife — the Dean’s wife role — was quite profound. They weren’t “other-worldly” but were the kind of friends and supporters we would all like to have.
This is the kind of love story that I like to read on a cool winter night here in So. California, wrapped in my grandmother’s afghan and sitting in front of the fire. It is full of warm fuzzies and good feelings and may even remind some of us of our own experiences. That, IMHO, is a really good read. I give this novel a 4 out of 5 rating.
Posted by Dr J at 8:00 AM 0 comments
Labels: contemporary romance, Jean C. Joachim, suspense
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Joachim Books 
Just read Callie’s Story and so now I have to have the lot and will most likely be up all night…. If I get no work done this week Joan I am holding you responsible..xxx Love Ya…xx