Breathless is a wonderful comfort read, and exactly what I needed from the moment I started it. I love when books do that – it’s like the best kind of surprise. If you enjoy intelligent characters embarking on a very sweet and emotionally adorable romance amid a community of caring, interconnected women working together in a thousand crucial ways, you’ll like this book.

Breathless is book two in what Jenkins calls in the author’s letter the “Rhine trilogy” and Goodreads calls the “Old West” trilogy. You can read this book if you haven’t read the first one, Forbidden, as this one takes place about 15 years afterward. But you could also read Forbidden because it’s awesome, and you get to spend more time with the characters – and there’s no better reason than that, really. Breathless worked so well for me in part because I could hang out with the hero and heroine, Kent and Portia, and the family and community around them, for many hundreds of pages.

Kent and Portia are connected through Rhine and Eddy, the hero and heroine of Forbidden. Portia and her sister Regan were sent as children (Portia was about 12) to live with their aunt Eddy by their mother, who had married someone who didn’t want to care for them. Portia and Regan deal with that betrayal and loss in different ways. At the start of Breathless, Portia has grown into a serious, intelligent woman who works for Rhine as a bookkeeper, and house manager of sorts. She’s in charge of guest services at the hotel Rhine and Eddy established in Arizona, and the place runs flawlessly because of her efforts.

Kent had worked for Rhine as a bartender at Rhine’s establishment in Nevada. After several years drifting through different jobs and a stint in a Mexican prison for banging a powerful dude’s wife, Kent rides into their lives again, older, wiser, more mature, and still good looking. Portia is immediately tempted by him, but she’s determined not to marry. She wants to open her own bookkeeping business, and be in complete control of her life. Kent is warned by Rhine not to trifle with Portia’s feelings, but Kent has serious intentions toward Portia.

Their romance is not beset by massive obstacles or external problems. They like each other, they respect one another, and their attraction grows into a deep friendship and trust, then easily into a romantic connection – and throughout all that progress they talk to each other openly and honestly in ways I found charming and very touching. Portia struggles with the idea of intimacy – due to details of her early childhood that are revealed in the story, Portia grew up with a sharp and deeply-held fear of men. Kent’s patience and understanding, and Portia’s bravery in sharing with him her fears and confusion, made their conversations fascinating, and added to the fuzzy layer of “comfort reading” I so enjoyed.

In their early conversations, Kent argues constantly with Portia in a way that on the surface could be interpreted as “man insisting women don’t know their own minds or their own desires.” But because Kent and Portia have known each other for a very long time, and because Portia deals with men who really do think that way (and deals with them brilliantly), I knew that Kent was partly teasing her while also trying to tell her that he understood she was attracted to him – and that it was ok. That he was safe. It would have bothered me, the number of times he appears to contradict her, challenging her statements about herself and her desires, except that Kent is also constantly demonstrating with his words and his actions that he respects her intelligence and accepts her as she is. Portia’s met a lot of subtle and not subtle resistance to the idea of an independent Black woman seeking to remain unmarried and run her business in her community. Kent argues with her to prove that both can be true: she can be an independent woman with her own business, and be happily, passionately married. He’s as honest as she is with his intentions so their scenes often read like subversions of the tired “Oh, she doesn’t know what’s best for her but I do” cliche. As you might imagine, I found that delicious.

Kent and Portia’s romance is not dramatic or fraught, and takes place in a world where a lot is going on politically and personally. It’s a sort of slice-of-life romance, like visiting people as they lived their lives, and I found it so interesting – most notably because of the ways women work together in the story. There are so many examples that once I started writing them down, I filled a page and a half with notes – and that’s not counting all the bookmarks and notes in my ebook copy, either. There are women raising one another up in every chapter, from Eddy becoming Portia and Regan’s mother to women working together in charitable organizations to champion other Black women, or to push towards suffrage for all women. There’s mention of how when Portia and Regan attended school, the women of their community sent letters and small gifts to encourage them and let them know they were loved. The women in and around the upscale hotel Rhine and Eddy run work together to feed people through celebrations and mourning, and look after one another through a myriad of essential and often overlooked or unappreciated tasks. Portia’s work running the hotel and managing the guests is reflected in the work every other woman in the story does, alone or in groups, and it’s often labor that isn’t appreciated or noticed, but is always essential.

Some of the most powerful scenes emotionally were not just between Portia and Kent, but between Portia and her sister, the two of them with Eddy, or the conversations at community gatherings. There’s one scene where Portia goes to Eddy to ask about birth control, and Portia learns that Eddy had already had that conversation with Regan – Portia’s younger sister. Eddy says, “…when she asked, I told her what she needed to know rather than judge her, refuse, and send her out into the world unprotected.” Oh, my heart. Right in the tender feels. Everyone in this story looks after the others, making sure that no one goes into the world unprotected, and that theme of protection takes several forms, some very obvious, and some very subtle.

There were a few moments I thought were ill-fitting, like a very-last-minute (in the last few chapters, in fact) dramatic moment that seemed tacked-on and rushed through. There were also characters whose interactions with the protagonists don’t always match the development they were given – I’m trying not to spoil here, so I apologize for vagueness. Sometimes the emotional journey for a character made enormous leaps forward that weren’t supported by the text, but in all, those were minor issues compared to the amount of contentment and solace I found in this book.

As I do with every Beverly Jenkins story, I learned about American history, and the women who moved mountains during that time but were largely forgotten by those who wrote it all down (Lozen! How did I not ever learn about Lozen?). I learned how small communities raised money and traveled long distances together to major cities for rallies and conferences on issues they cared about, such as women’s suffrage. I also loved how the characters themselves were frank about who among the women’s suffrage movement was and was not on their side regarding giving the vote to Black women. The message I read in the layers of this story was, as I said, exactly what I needed: there are rough spots, painful days, and awful moments to manage, but in this book, when those things happen, Portia can count on Kent, and on Eddy, and Regan, and the women around them, to offset the pain and provide much-needed comfort.

For me, this novel was that same much-needed comfort.