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Starting Over
Untie My Heart follows a grieving mother and her traumatized five-year-old daughter as they begin rebuilding their lives and find comfort in the quiet patience and tenderness of a local contractor. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
This is a continuation of the Family Ties series that focuses on Noble, who was introduced in book two (Broken Ties). He had an interest in pursuing the heroine in that book, but opted to discontinue his pursuit when he discovered that his best friend was also interested. I wanted to give Noble his HEA, so I created this story for that purpose.
Mesa carries both love and anger toward her late husband. Why was it important to portray grief as something so emotionally conflicted rather than straightforward?
There are several “stages” of grief, as any good therapist will tell you. Most people experience all of them at some point after losing someone they love. I wanted to give readers permission to explore those stages instead of trying to rush through them. Grief looks different to everyone. There is no right or wrong way to grieve. That’s what I was hoping to get across in this book. Mesa tries to rush the process by moving away and starting over, hoping everything will be better. But what she finds is that she can’t just change locations to avoid the true cycle of loss. She has to work through the different stages and emotions as they surface.
The purple jellybeans become a surprisingly powerful symbol of trust and comfort. How did that small detail find its way into the story?
That’s funny, actually. I had no intention of using them as symbols of anything. My husband is a huge jellybean fan. It’s his favorite candy. I really just wanted to work that love of jellybeans into a character somehow, and it seems Noble fit the bill. It was not an intentional choice to use candy as a bridge between Noble and Merrick. He first offered the candy as a way to connect with Merrick and try to calm her fear, and that just grew into something bigger. I didn’t even see the jellybeans as being symbolic until I read the reviews.
What can we expect to see in the next installment of the Family Ties series?
This is the last book in this series. At least for now. My brain is plotting another series down the road using the next generation of all the characters introduced in all three books in this series. So…there may be a book about Merrick, as an adult, at some point. We’ll see. Right now, I’m working on a different series: a romantic mystery series set in the fictitious town of Revelation, West Virginia.
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After the sudden and violent death of her husband, Mesa Adler buys a cabin in the wilds of Jackson Hole, Wyoming hoping to escape her grief. But the fresh start she hoped for turns out to be more than a fixer-upper in a new town—it’s an isolated property, a challenging environment, and full of unexpected surprises. Not the least of which is Noble Jabeaux, a carpenter with quiet, irresistible charm.
Military Veteran, Noble Jabeaux, traded his nomadic career for the less rigid life of a carpenter in Jackson Hole. While running an errand for a friend, he encounters Mesa and little Merrick alone at a rundown cabin in the woods. Curiosity about the aloof pair engages a sense of protectiveness. And undeniable attraction. Offering to help her remodel the cabin seems a simple solution. But life is about to get a lot more complicated when sparks fly, emotions deepen, and unhealed wounds reopen.
When Merrick is wrongfully taken by her grieving grandmother, Mesa faces the fight of her life to regain custody. With time running out, Noble may be the only man who can help. As the fight for her daughter intensifies, Mesa must face her deepest fears, confront her grief, and learn how to untie her heart from the love she lost to embrace the one she never expected.
In the mountains, some hearts are hard to let go of…others are worth risking everything for.
Untie My Heart – Book 3 in the Family Ties Series
Untie My Heart, by Jansen Schmidt, follows Mesa Adler as she flees the wreckage of her old life with her traumatized five-year-old daughter, Merrick, and tries to begin again in a remote fixer-upper near Jackson Hole. Still haunted by the death of her husband, Erik, and by the damage his military trauma left behind, Mesa is determined to build something safe, quiet, and wholly her own. What she doesn’t expect is Noble Jabeaux, a patient contractor with jellybeans in his pocket, tenderness in his hands, and secrets of his own. As Mesa and Merrick slowly let him into their lives, the story widens from home renovation and fragile attraction into a tense custody fight with Erik’s mother, Sylvia, forcing everyone to confront grief, fear, loyalty, and the complicated work of choosing life after loss.
What moved me most about this book is how carefully it treats healing as something ordinary and physical, not just emotional. Mesa doesn’t magically recover because a good man arrives. She scrubs floors, pulls up filthy carpet, worries over paint colors, comforts a child who clings to a pink blanket, and tries to breathe through memories that still ambush her. Those domestic details give the novel its heartbeat. I loved how Merrick’s recovery comes in tiny, believable increments: a laugh in the backseat, a pinky promise, a ride on Sienna, the fierce comfort she finds in Noble’s presence. The purple jellybeans could’ve felt too cute in a lesser book, but here they become a small language of trust. I also appreciated that Mesa’s feelings for Noble are tangled with guilt rather than swept clean. Her attraction to him doesn’t erase Erik, and her anger at Erik doesn’t erase love. That emotional contradiction felt honest to me.
The writing has a warm, sensory fullness that suits the story’s western setting and wounded characters. I could feel the stale carpet dust, the cold bite of spring snow, the hush of the aspens, the awkward tenderness of a man trying not to move too fast around a frightened child. At times, the prose leans hard into internal explanation, and a few emotional beats are stated more than they need to be, especially when the characters circle the same fears. Noble can also feel almost impossibly attuned, a little too ready with the right word, the right gesture, the right protective instinct. Still, I found myself forgiving much of that because the book’s emotional architecture is so sincere. Its best ideas are quietly powerful: that grief can become a locked room, that love after death isn’t betrayal, that children notice safety before adults can explain it, and that community sometimes arrives in the form of diners, bikers, horses, lawyers, and people who simply refuse to let you suffer alone.
By the end, I felt that Untie My Heart had earned its title. It’s a romance, certainly, but I read it more as a story about loosening the knots trauma leaves in a family’s body and spirit. The book takes its time showing that tenderness doesn’t come easily, but must be fought for and chosen again and again. I’d recommend this to readers who enjoy contemporary western romance with serious emotional stakes, especially those drawn to stories about second chances, found family, military trauma, small-town support systems, and love that feels less like rescue than a steady hand held out in the dark.
Pages: 449 | ASIN : B0H4RVKQ7K
