Trapped: Until You Love Me by Mila Olsen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
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Trapped: Until You Love Me
I can still picture him perfectly, the way he looked on the day he kidnapped me. It was already early evening, and his dark eyes shimmered in the light of the setting sun. Sparks danced within them like tiny will-o’-the-wisps from an enchanted world, seeming to promise secrets, maybe even adventures. Back then, I wanted both.
How else could I have been so deaf and blind to all the warning signals? The glances over his shoulder to check whether the backpackers had gone inside yet, the laughter that echoed through the silence a shade too loudly. I didn’t notice, or didn’t want to. All I heard were the silent questions behind that shimmer in his eyes.
Do you want this.
It could have meant anything.
Do you want to come with me?
Do you want to sleep with me?
Do you want me to kidnap you?
Louisa hates Ash Springs more than anything. She dreams of escaping the tiny village in the Nevada desert, of finding excitement and adventure. On a camping trip to Sequoia National Park with her four brothers, she meets the mysterious Brendan, and her life takes a dramatic turn… because for Brendan, it’s not a chance encounter at all. He’s been meticulously planning every step of Louisa’s abduction. Brendan whisks her away to the Canadian wilderness, an endless expanse of spruce trees and blue sky, populated only by wolves and ermines. He tells her she’s the light in his darkness. As her days of imprisonment turn to weeks, Louisa is forced to confront not only her own desperate terror, but Brendan’s traumatic past as well. Soon he becomes more to her than just her captor, which throws Louisa into a maelstrom of conflicting emotions: sympathy, need, even… love? Can she love her kidnapper? And just how dangerous is Brendan?
Wow!
The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 💙🖤💜❤️💖
Heat/Steam: 🔥
Story/Plot: 📕📗📙📘📔
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌍🌎
Character development: 😔🤓😀😘🥰
The heroine: Louisa – she lives in Ash Springs, Nevada and is a high school student. It is a tiny little desert town in the middle of nowhere, where nobody would want to live. She has four older brothers (Liam, Ethan, Jayden and Avery). Ethan, who is now twenty-nine, got custody of all of them after their dad died when he was eighteen. Louisa just passed the admissions test to be in the Hades in Love club. The test was a prank, and she dyed the school mashed potatoes blue. She is the first in her grade and only the third in her town to be in the elite club. Being in the club means more friends, parties, trips to Las Vegas and more. What she wants more than anything is to get out there and start living.
The Story: Louisa was in trouble for more than just the blue mashed potatoes, there was a whole list of things she got in trouble for including putting her most personal hopes and dreams of getting away and doing something exciting on her Facebook wall. Her punishment was that she couldn’t join the Hades in Love club and Ethan canceled her modeling camp that she was planning to attend over the summer. Instead, she would be going on a camping vacation with her brothers. All that and he suspended her social media accounts after she posted their travel plans on Facebook.
The Hero: Brendan – Louisa meets Brenden at the visitor’s center of the campground where her and her brothers are staying. She had to run over there at the last minute to buy some lanterns which she was supposed to pack but forgot. Her brother Ethan was very mad at her and called her useless. So, when a hot guy such as Brendan pays attention to her, she feels better. When he asks if she wants a ride in his RV back to her campsite, she says yes, but when he knocks her out with chloroform, she knows something bad is happening.
The world building and character development in this book is really good. We get to know each of Louisa’s brothers really well from the start and can see exactly what her life is like. I can see why a teenager like her would want out, as that is how most teenagers think, but really, we can see that her life isn’t so bad, and her brothers all love her and want the best for her. Immediately after she gets kidnapped, I feel so bad for what her brothers were probably going through.
The writing is good, and I love that it takes you through everything that Louisa is thinking and feeling those first days after she wakes up having been kidnapped and taken from everything she knows. At first, she fears Brendan will rape and kill her, then she learns how truly crazy he is when he knows almost everything about her, yet she doesn’t know who he is or how he learned so much about her.
“Until a few hours ago, Brendan was just the horrible kidnapper psychopath that lured me into his trap. The person I was terrified of. The evil, evil guy who gave me knockout drops and stuck me in a box. Who apparently stalked me for months. Until a few hours ago, he didn’t have a past—he was my kidnapper, and that was that. Now, all of a sudden, he’s a human being with feelings. Someone who’s been hurt. Like, really hurt.”
This was a rollercoaster ride full of emotions. The reader goes along the journey with Louisa from captive to feeling something for her kidnapper. Brendan is actually a pretty nice guy despite the way he kidnapped Louisa, and he is definitely broken from his childhood. I loved the fact that he promised her he wouldn’t touch her unless she wanted him to, and he kept that promise. He never raped her or was violent with her and he even did some crazy things to protect her from himself.
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