"Will deceit tear them apart?" — that question hit me around hour seven, and I had to pause my screen and just sit there with Frida purring in my lap, because I already knew the answer but my chest didn't care. It hurt anyway.
So look. Cherished is book four in Kelly Elliott's Wanted series, and if you haven't listened to the first three, I'm going to be honest — you're going to feel like you walked into someone else's family reunion. This is a series that builds on itself, layers relationships and grudges and inside jokes and Texas dust like coats of paint on an old fence. Jessie and Scott's story doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's soaked in everything that came before.
The Kind of Love That Makes You Stupid
Jessie Rhodes has been carrying a torch for Scott Reynolds since basically forever, and the way this book handles that — the weight of wanting someone who already broke you once — it felt like wearing a wet sweater. Heavy and uncomfortable and you can't just take it off because you're in public. When Scott's ex-fiancée pulls her deception and Jessie's world cracks open again, I literally whispered "no no no no" at my laptop like the Illustrator file I was working on could hear me and intervene.
Here's what got me: Jessie doesn't just crumble. She runs. And not in that dramatic romance-novel way where she books a flight to Paris and reinvents herself over croissants. She retreats somewhere quiet and meets someone new and starts to genuinely question whether the love she's been holding onto is even good for her. That ambiguity? That's the stuff that wrecks me. Because I've been the person clinging to something familiar when maybe the unfamiliar thing is healthier. And this book sits in that uncomfortable middle space for a good stretch before it lets you breathe.
The Texas setting is real — not postcard Texas, but lived-in Texas. The kind where family is everything and everyone's in your business and the land itself feels like a character. Growing up going back and forth between Austin and my abuela's place in San Antonio, I know that texture. Kelly Elliott gets it. The way community wraps around you like a vine — sometimes holding you up, sometimes choking you.
Two Voices, One Messy Love Story
Arika Rapson and Nelson Hobbs handle the dual narration, and here's where I have to be straight with you — I don't have a ton of specifics on their individual vocal choices because the research is thin on that front. What I can tell you is this: the dual POV format works for a book like this because Jessie and Scott are operating on completely different information for huge chunks of the story. You need to hear Scott's desperation when Jessie vanishes. You need to hear it in a voice that isn't hers. That separation — emotional and literal — lands harder when you're toggling between two narrators instead of one person doing both.
The Texas authenticity comes through in the delivery, which matters more than people think. When a romance is rooted in a specific place and culture, the narration has to honor that or the whole thing feels like a costume. It didn't feel like a costume here.
That said — and I want to be fair — neither narrator made me forget I was listening to a performance. They're good. Solid. But I wasn't getting Julia Whelan-level emotional subtlety where a single breath shift tells you a character is about to fall apart. The performances serve the story well without elevating it into something transcendent.
Who Needs This Book (And Who Doesn't)
If you've been riding with the Wanted series, this is your reward. The threads come together, the family saga pays off, and you get that satisfying sense of completion that a fourth book in a romance series should deliver. If you love second-chance romance with real stakes — not manufactured misunderstandings but actual betrayal and distance and the terrifying possibility that sometimes love isn't enough — Jessie and Scott's story will gut you in the best way. Beneath This Man scratched a similar itch for me — that same brutal push-pull where you're rooting for two people who keep finding new ways to hurt each other before they finally figure it out.
If you're looking for a standalone? Skip this one and start at book one. You'll thank me.
If you need fast pacing, this might test your patience. At eleven-plus hours, it takes its time. I listened at my usual 1.0x while finishing a branding project that needed zero creative energy (thank God), and there were stretches in the middle where I wanted the plot to move faster than it did. But the emotional payoff in the final hours earned that slow build.
I ugly-cried at the reconciliation scene. Not the big dramatic one you'd expect — the quiet one after, where they're just talking in that raw, scraped-open way people talk when they've finally stopped performing for each other. My heart. MY HEART.
Abuela would have loved this one. She'd have called Scott "tonto" for the first half and then cried right alongside me at the end.
