Steadfast is a gritty second-chance-at-love story. We first met Jude in Bittersweet as the former junkie trying to make good. He had just been released from prison and then detox and worked on the Shipley farm as a way to get established again and stay clean. In that book, he comes across as a decent, if troubled, guy.

In this book, Jude has nowhere else to go as the harvesting season has ended, and he has returned to his home town, Colebury, to live with his father and work as a mechanic at his garage. Jude assumes that the love of his life, Sophie, is still in town. Of course he’s decided to stay away from her because he doesn’t want to drag her down with him. He’s genuinely trying to stay clean, fighting the cravings that haunt him every day.

Sophie is still in town. She’s finishing up her Bachelor’s degree and working as an intern in a social work position, which she’s hoping will turn into a full-time job after she graduates, even though she doesn’t really expect it to happen because her fellow intern is finishing his Master’s. Then there’s her mess of a family. Her father is a bonafide asshole, the local police chief who can’t do any wrong. And her mom has been basically nonfunctional since the accident that killed Sophie’s brother.

The accident is even more significant because her brother was in Jude’s car when he was killed. And although Sophie and Jude had been very much together when it happened, he went straight to jail and then prison and she hasn’t spoken to him in the three-plus years he’s been gone. He refused her letters in prison and she hasn’t even been able to learn anything about him. Her brother was a douche, but she’s still eaten up with desire to know what happened that night. What happened to her brother—and what happened to Jude.

So, with that setup, a lot happens. As I mentioned, this is a gritty book—we feel Jude’s suffering as he tries to resist the urge to find more junk to take himself away from everything that’s shit. Because on top of everything he’s dealing with, there’s some fallout from the night of the accident. Even though he doesn’t remember himself what happened, there were some drugs involved and somebody’s looking for them. Sophie is dealing with taking care of her parents, cooking dinner every night for her hateful and ungrateful father and her practically comatose mother.

But of course, when they run into each other, sparks fly yet again. After one of his NA meetings at the church, Jude ends up getting talked into volunteering to help at a community dinner by the priest, only to find that Sophie is a regular volunteer there.

After a while, they can’t keep away from each other even though they both try. She is trying to not be in love with him because he really hurt her, and he naturally thinks the best thing for her is for him to not be in her life. If her father finds out that she’s seeing Jude at all, she’s in real danger. We don’t see her father’s true nature until the end of the book, but we sense it throughout. That combined with the threat looming over Jude’s head means constant tension.

The book is immensely satisfying. There are enjoyable flashbacks to when Sophie and Jude were first together, when they were teenagers. And there are also a couple of good twists that I didn’t really see coming (at least not at first). Even though there’s plenty of sex, the sexual tension is there throughout (just as you’d expect from Bowen). Although it’s the second in the series, there’s no reason you need to have read Bittersweet first (except for the fact that it’s awesome).