Let Love Rule by Jacqueline Simon Gunn 💕 Guest Post, Book Tour & Gift Card Giveaway 💕 (Contemporary Romance)

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From award-winning author Jacqueline Simon Gunn comes the long-awaited third book in her Where You’ll Land series, a story about trauma, healing, love and discovering who we are by the choices we make.

Will Easton had been running from old wounds for too long when a tragedy sends him to his hometown, offering him the opportunity to revisit his past and learn to trust again. Once back at graduate school, he vows to take more risks, especially with his heart. When he meets Rachel, he is immediately drawn to her. But there are two problems: She’s still married, and he feels an obligation to his on-again/off-again girlfriend who stood by him. No matter how much he wants to be loyal, he feels a strong pull toward this new woman.

Rachel Dale finally found the strength to cut the cord to her cheating husband. When she meets Will, she finds herself irresistibly attracted to him. But he appears to have a girlfriend, and she refuses to become the other woman in someone else’s story. Besides, learning to trust another man is going to be hard. Trusting herself and her judgment after her husband’s betrayals is even harder. Meanwhile, her soon-to-be-ex is not letting her go easily. He could destroy any chance she and Will might have… if he ever leaves his girlfriend.

As Will and Rachel struggle to make the right choices, they both learn that saying they’ll trust again doesn’t mean it’ll be easy. In this complex, psychological romance, the most important choices are the ones that break the rules.

Let Love Rule can be read as a stand-alone.

How did you come up with the title Let Love Rule?

Sometimes a title comes to me very early in the writing process. But not this one. Let Love Rule had remained nameless until the manuscript was just about ready for final edits. It was driving me crazy.

The book has many layers. On the surface, it’s a love story, two broken people struggling to heal old wounds and learn to trust in love once again. But the narrative is complicated and tied together by the underlying message that the most important choices we make are the ones that break the rules. I wanted a title that both screamed love story and embraced this theme.

My writing process is so weird. I begin with the character development and then they take over the story. I am a passenger on their journey, never entirely sure where we are going or where we’ll land. My mind also seems to weave themes into the narrative before I even know what they are. Most times, I am at least halfway through the manuscript before I can see them. I can’t outline, because I don’t know where I am going until I’m writing.

Alex (one of my protagonists) came up with Let Love Rule. While refining the last paragraph of the whole book, for the last time, Alex’s words pulled the whole story together and the title spilled out. It was as if she understood what I wanted to convey better than I did.

Sweat dripped down his chest. I never thought I could envy a piece of fabric until I saw his T-shirt kissing his skin the way I wanted to. Next thing I knew, I was only in my thong. I did not mean to come on so strong or be the one to take the initiative — even though that was my MO. I was not into those rules about waiting for the guy to make the move. It was exhausting.

But I had promised myself I’d do this one differently, thinking that things never worked out because I showed all my cards too early. Also, I couldn’t ignore that I was still healing from my husband’s betrayal. It was hard to trust not only someone new, but my own judgment too.

I knew he liked me — or at least the old me would have thought so — but I didn’t know if I could trust that feeling. It had come so readily before. Each man would lose interest almost as quickly as they got it. So, when X-man wandered into the arms of another woman — probably one who played it coy and demure, one who was willing to play that role guys seemed to want — it broke something in my spirit.

Being near Will brought out some of the me that I was before I was damaged, so I stripped down and went with it. I also wanted to remove my thong, but I left that one piece for him to take off. The anticipation coursing through me gave me butterflies. Under the stars, wrapped around him, more of the self that had been murdered by my broken marriage, emerged. With that came my old familiar thought process: We’re interested in each other. Why wait if we both know we want it?

But he stopped me.

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After a bad breakup, I packed up my life and moved to Miami to study for my doctorate in psychology. I made one promise to myself: Do not get romantically involved while I was in school. I needed to heal.

And then Will Easton came into my life. He was warm and sweet and intelligent. And he got me. What I didn’t know was that Will was running from a tragedy of his own.

When you try to escape your past without confronting your emotions, you repeat those same past patterns over and over. And that’s just what happened to Will and me, along with a few others who got swept up into the storm that was our relationship. Then came the awful secret. The one that changed everything.

Sometimes the most painful relationships are the ones that help us grow into who we are and to find the love we had been searching for all along.

Which begs the question: Can we choose who we love?

My second year of graduate school started like a new beginning. And I was interested in a new man. One I believed I could love for all the right reasons. The last two guys, as it turned out, were not good for me. At all.

But my recent ex-boyfriend was not making it easy to leave the past behind. He decided that I was the one who got away. He couldn’t give me what I wanted when we were together, but now he wouldn’t leave me alone. Meanwhile, the old guy was dating Cecilia, who was the ex-girlfriend of the new guy I was seeing. And the new guy had broken her heart. Plus, we were all in the same school program. We saw each other all the time. Messy is an understatement.

As I tried to navigate the slippery slope between falling in love with someone I saw a real future with and staying away from the guy I’d given my whole heart to, but for all the wrong reasons, Cecilia and I became good friends. We told each other things about our past lovers we probably shouldn’t have. There was one big secret, though, that she didn’t tell me. I guess there are some things that hurt so much we’re afraid to say them aloud.

I’d like to tell you that it was easy to walk away from the guy who hurt me to be with the one who seemed to promise everything I wanted, but that’s not how love works. This is a story about real love, heartache and growth, passion and secrets. This is my tangled tale of what it took for me to risk my heart again and how and where I finally landed.

This is the second book in the Where You’ll Land series but can be read as a stand-alone.

Jacqueline Simon Gunn is a Manhattan-based clinical psychologist and writer. She has authored two non-fiction books and co-authored two others. She has published many articles, both scholarly and mainstream, and currently works as a freelance writer. Gunn is now writing psychological fiction, love stories and thrillers. Always in search of truth and fascinated by human behavior, her fiction writing, like psychology, is a way for her to explore human nature -- motivation, emotions, relationships.

In addition to her clinical practice and writing, Gunn is an avid runner and reader, a serious cat lover and a coffee connoisseur. She is currently working on multiple writing projects.