I continue in my nostalgic pursuit of finding category romance. In this case, I read Nicole Helm, an author whose longer-form contemporary romance I enjoyed. And … nope. It wasn’t terrible, except for one puerile bit, but it also isn’t going to send me running to read more of this category. It didn’t help that I came in at #6: there were A LOT of previous book couples, with convoluted family histories, fostered, biological, and adopted, AND, it appears, six? seven? brothers from one ranch marrying the various sisters from the neighbouring one. Yeah, it was Seven Brides for Seven Brothers without the humour, music, or, well, the fun. Without overburdening my poor readers with the endless backstory, let’s give it over to the blurb for some plot and character filler:
Dev Wyatt’s worst fear has come true. Someone from the Wyatts’ dangerous past is stalking his family—and his best friend, Sarah Knight. When she asked Dev to help her have a child, Sarah did not expect her pregnancy would place her in danger, but now Sarah must take shelter on the Wyatt ranch. As she and Dev battle escalating threats, will they survive long enough to become a family?
Um, blurb-foiler: this sounds like it has forced-proximity potential. Au contraire, the Wyatt ranch is peopled with a gazillion brothers, their wives, children, and pets. The sexy times, given Sarah is nine months pregnant (not what we see on the cover), days from her due date, are strictly closed-bedroom-door and sparse, which is a-okay by me. As for the mini-village living together, with a grandmother to boot, I did not even try to figure out who’s who and who’s with who, or who begat who. (more…)
Reading Caitlin Crews’s Cold Heart, Warm Cowboy right after Yates’s Lone Wolf Cowboy was like seeing the two romances in a two-way mirror. They are linked by ethos and setting and would be, you might think, too much of a good thing one after the other. Nope. I was as immersed in the former as the latter. Besides, who can resist amnesia and secret-baby trope combined!? Maybe a lot of romance readers can, but I can’t! Moreover, Cold Heart, Warm Cowboy was the follow-up to one of my favourites 2018 romances, A True Cowboy Christmas, though not as good and there be reasons. Cold Heart, Warm Cowboy picks up where True Cowboy Christmas departs, centering on Everett middle brother, Ty, though we have delicious glimpses of the hero and heroine of True Cowboy enjoying married bliss. Cold Heart, Warm Cowboy opens with the heroine, former-rodeo-queen Hannah Leigh Monroe. She’s on her way to Cold River Ranch to confront Ty with the cold hard facts of: exhibit A, their marriage (Las Vegas certificate and all) and exhibit B, their 10-month-old baby, Jack, though Jack’s safely with her mother back in Hannah’s hometown of Sweet Myrtle, Georgia. After what happened eighteen months ago, Hannah thinks it’s high time Ty and she divorced.
To date, there are 19 Copper Ridge romances and this, Cowboy To the Core, sixth in the complementary Gold Valley series. And here I am, having stayed up late to inhale yet another Maisey Yates romance. You’d think, after 25 of an author’s works, I’d be ready to roll my eyes and thrown in the reader bookmark. Nope. If you asked me which are my favourites so far (’cause I know you’re aching to read these, but may not be willing to tackle all 25), I’d say Brokedown Cowboy (Copper Ridge #2), One Night Charmer (Copper Ridge #7), Seduce Me, Cowboy (Copper Ridge #12), and A Tall, Dark Cowboy Christmas (Gold Valley #4) are top-notch, but I’ve enjoyed each and every one. (Any Copper Ridge/Gold Valley may be read as a standalone, but there are cameos of happy couples from previous books. So you’ve been warned.)
I went into Kelly Hunter’s Emma not expecting much more than a pleasant, “forgettable” read and got a whole lot more. The cover, though pleasant enough, doesn’t do it any favours. Hm, I thought, alpha-male outback hero, like a Montana-Texas-etc. cowboy but with an Oz accent, meets poor-little-English-rich-girl heroine, overwhelms her with his manliness and bedsport prowess and done! Not exactly. Yes, hero Liam McNair is the proprietor of acres and acres of Australian outback and yes, he does muster cows and such, but he’s also environmentally savvy and conscious, seeing himself more as a steward of the land than owner. He’s humble, diffident, still huge and gorgeous, but definitely thoroughly unaware of how attractive and desirable he is. Enter what the blurb calls our “English rose” heroine, Lady Emmaline Charlotte Greyson, recently defunct lawyer and she-who-abandoned-the-family-firm-and-obligations to run away to Australia to her friend Maggie’s wedding-venue-ranch, one she runs with husband Max and adorable toddler, Bridie, also Emmaline’s god-daughter. Enter Max’s friend, Liam, who’s sent to pick up Emmaline at the airport (they share some past, mild history) and tara! Insta-lust! NOT! Attraction, liking, interest, yes. And how it plays out? In a surprisingly adult and compelling romance narrative. Emmaline answers Liam’s call for mustering help (she’s a great horsewoman) and they find themselves aloft his helicopter for the four-hour drive. Thus begins a lovely weeks-long courtship … 
Carly Bloom is a new-to-me author and Big Bad Cowboy, her début romance. If she sustains this level of humour and pathos, then she has a good chance of becoming many romance readers’ autobuy. Big Bad Cowboy is a tongue-in-cheek pastiche of many romance conceits and in its combining of them, uniquely itself. Be warned, however, Big Bad Cowboy is busy with conceits and stories within stories. To start, the hero, Travis Blake, newly-returned Afghan vet to his dilapidated, tax-debt-ridden Texas ranch and uncle to his incarcerated brother’s and dead sister-in-law’s five-year-old, Henry. Henry is precocious, hilariously sharp-tongued, and Travis knows it from the get-go: 
Caitlin Crews’s A True Cowboy Christmas is one of the most convincing contemporary marriage-of-convenience romances I’ve read … and so many other things. It opens with the hero’s father’s funeral. Gray Everett, however, is not mourning his father, but afraid of ending up like him. Gray introduces us to the family with: “Everetts historically lived mean and more than a little feral … tended to nurse the bottle or wield their piety like a weapon, spending their days alone and angry.” Gray’s Colorado ranch, Cold River Ranch, has never been a happy home. His father, a mean, violent drunk; his cheating wife, dead for ten years in a car crash; Gray works the land, cattle, and horses, keeps the bank at bay, and rears his teen daughter, Becca. Back at the ranch, at the post-funeral luncheon, where neighbours and friends have gathered to pay their respects and many to breathe a sigh of relief that Amos Everett’s meanness will no longer touch anyone, Gray realizes that ” … if he didn’t change”, “today’s grumpy hermit” would become “tomorrow’s bitter, old man.” He resolves, there and then, in sight of the funeral-baked casseroles, that he “was going to have to figure out a way to live this life without drowning in his own darkness” and “to make sure that Becca didn’t succumb to it either.” Gray looks up from his thoughts to heroine and neighbour-spinster Abby Douglas’s question, should she warm up a casserole? 
Maisey Yates opens Gold Valley romance #4 with the line “Grant Dodge was alone. And that was how he liked it”, ensuring the reader that Grant Dodge is about to NOT be alone and that his hold on his solitude is to be shaken by the heroine. Said heroine, McKenna Tate, is blithely slumbering in an abandoned cabin on the ranch Grant shares with his brother Wyatt, sister-in-law Lindy, and sometimes-around veterinarian brother Bennett and sister-in-law, Kaylee. A “full house” of family and connections, but Grant prefers his solitude: what’s up with that and how will it be “shook up”? My tone may be flippant as I introduce Yates’s romance, but the romance is anything but: it’s angsty, heart-wrenching stuff with two very broken, very vulnerable, pain-filled protagonists. One is broken by his first marriage and the other broken by a life as a foster child, unloved, unwanted, uncared for. Reading their story, I thought Yates penned her most painful story yet, unredeemed by humour, or playful sex, banter (okay, there are soupçons of banter, but hardly) tenderness or joy. Grant and McKenna are two suffering characters, with burdens making Aeneas’s look like fluff, and the romance suffers under their weight as much as they do.
After nearly a month of reading Harari’s 21 Lessons, I sure needed a heavy romance dose. Who better than Nicole Helm to provide an antidote to Harari’s intellectual harshness? Why Helm? There are romance writers who love romance and that comes through in their writing, say Mary Balogh, the romance classicist, or the contemporary Lucy Parker. Then, there are romance writers who believe in romance and one of those is Helm. Another is her sister-in-writing, Maisey Yates. There’s a genuine belief in their stories as being tangible, possible, and attainable outside the pages of a book, no matter how idealized their characters. Though I’d recently read and reviewed a Helm romance, I knew she was going to cleanse the reading palate: Harari was nice, like having an exotic meal once in a while, or eating on vacay what you wouldn’t at home. But I was ready for my usual fare and enjoyed every but five minutes of it (more of that later).
We meet Cora Preston, the heroine of Nicole Helm’s A Nice Day For A Cowboy Wedding, as she comes into her own: 
Over the summer, I jumped off the Maisey Yates bandwagon. She’s prolific and I did have an ARC in the TBR. Something Something Cowboy. I read the first page, slapped the Kindle shut and moved on. No can do. There it was *eye roll* the typical Yates antagonism, the heroine with the defiant mouth, the surly and/or laid-back hero … usually, this is reading catnip for me. I quixotically thought, Yates and I are parting company. You’d rightly say: here you are, MissB., reviewing another Yates romance. (Which I loved, btw … ) So, what happened? I have a terrible reader confession, so petty, kinda mean: I cannot read tall heroines, just can’t. No way. Every other ilk I’m cool with, but once a heroine confesses to tallness, there’s a disconnect. And that points to something about what I want as a reader: a tiny connection with the heroine that says, “You’re small, but you can do this.” Maybe because I’m small, like Jane-Eyre small, and since reading Brontë’s novel, it has stood as a model of what a heroine should be: humble, but never diminished. It’s terrible and … prejudicial … and goodness knows, we don’t need any more of that in the world, but there you have it. But with Good Time Cowboy, Yates hit all my satisfaction levels and I’m back on the bandwagon. 
Miss Bates Reads Romance 