A Really Reluctant Dad -- or -- "An Unmistakable Rogue" by Annette Blair

Married and widowed in short order, Chastity Somers vows to claim her bridegroom's inheritance as the long-lost St. Yves, Earl of Barrington. But she must contend with Reed Gilbride, who also believes himself the missing St. Yves. The dangerously handsome military man has the power to derail all her dreams.

I know Father's Day was 10 days back, but this story captivated my interest and I wanted to share it with my visitors/folloapwers.  I haven't posted much for a while as we are getting ready to mozy down the road toward Pennsylvania, Virginia, Georgia, Alabama and then back home during July.  But as I was reading this book, I couldn't help but think about Father's Day, my own dad, and what it must have been like to be growing up in a society where being a child was a dangerous thing.  

We read historical romances and see children who cosseted and spoiled, but Charles Dickens had it right when he painted the picture of children whose lives were seriously in danger from starvation, poverty, cold, and most of all, neglect and disinterest on the part of the greater society.  In this entertaining historical novel, set in the years just after the Battle of Waterloo, characters and relationships which were first introduced in this series' first book continue to make their appearance.  Reed Gilbride was a decorated officer in the war, but when he returned to England he was a man at loose ends--no family, no roots, and no knowledge of who he really was.  A  mysterious note causes him to begin his search for information that will prove that he is the heir of a long-dead earl.  But in his search he encounters a gutsy, sassy, and determined woman whose love for all things helpless has caused her to take charge of a whole cadre of children, apparently abandoned by people given responsibility for them by their desperate mother.  And the last thing Reed Gilbride needed in his life was a sassy woman loaded down with children. . . UGH!!

Yet the one thing Reed couldn't seem to avoid was the way his emotions resonated with these kids--he saw his own pain, he remembered his own drive to survive, he empathized with the defensive walls that enclosed their hearts because they didn't want to endure anymore loss and its resulting pain.  He saw Chastity's drive and experienced her warmth and generosity, he did all he could to avoid her giving ways and responding to her ways of including him as even a temporary member of her household.  Yet through it all he began to experience the rejuvenating effects of the kindness she brought into his life, the connections he couldn't seem to resist with those delightful kids.

This is a story about another battered and bruised and deeply injured veteran of the Battle of Waterloo, a member of the Rogue's Club--a small group of English officers who vowed to "be there" for each other and any survivors of those who didn't return from the war.  Yet Reed felt he had so little to give since he couldn't even figure out who he really was.  The kindness and grace Chastity injected into his heart not only changed the direction of his life, it renewed his belief in himself and opened his heart to others far more than he could ever have expected.

This book is a fun read in so many ways but it is also one that tugs strongly at your heart strings.  It was first released a number of years ago and is now being re-released.  How glad I found it and have had opportunity to read and enjoy.  It's a wonderful book that is built around the journey of discovery of a man whose desire to be a father was absolutely nil.  And yet, of all the Rogues, he came farthest in realizing a dream he wasn't aware he even possessed.

It's a great book and one that I think is even better than the preceding ones.  It certainly grabbed me, and I hope you can get hold of it and enjoy it as much as I did.  I give it a rating of 4 out of 5.

Widowed, penniless Sabrina Whitcomb isn't looking for romance. What she needs is a husband, and she knows well enough that romance and matrimony aren't always compatible. While providing for her twins and the child she now carries is paramount, wedding a virtual stranger--even a wealthy one, like Gideon St. Goddard, Duke of Stanthorpe--is no light matter. Sabrina knows the friend who arranged the union would not promise her to a true scoundrel, but one look at her future husband convinces her that he is a shameless rogue. A shockingly handsome and desirable one, at that. Why has he agreed to marry her? When Gideon flashes that wicked, seductive smile, the reason hardly matters, but the chance that he'll steal her heart becomes all too real.

This is a novel, first in a series, that was first published in 2002 and has now been re-released to the delight of historical romance fans and those who are especially fans of stories set in the post-Napoleonic era.  Six English officers, facing death before the battle of Waterloo, determined that they would enter into a pact together--not truly an original plot line--yet these men agreed that they would not only care for one another but they would also accept responsibility for looking out for any families who were left behind if one of them were to be killed.  And so began the saga of The Rogues' Club and the stories of four of these six British officers.

Sabrina had lived through circumstances that most of modern women can't even conceive of as being possible.  Yet for her--a woman who had literally been "sold" into marriage by her father in exchange for money and who was again "sold" by her husband because he couldn't pay his gambling debts--finding herself betrothed to the Duke of Stanthorpe didn't sound all that bad.  It was a marriage arranged by her brother-in-law--half-brother to her now-deceased husband--and upon whose assurances she relied that the Duke was a man of honor who would keep his word and provide for her and her children, regardless of how well they ultimately rubbed along.  But this is a story that once again reminds readers that secrets don't make for good relationship foundations and for both Sabrina and Gideon, it is a lesson that can cost them both dearly.

Ms Blair is an author with an impressive string of published stories and novels, whose books have received awards and award nominations and whose fans keep on loving her books.  For those of us who are only now discovering her work through the medium of e-publishing, it is a new and wonderful gift and one that just keeps on giving.  It is the kind of story that worms its way into your mind and emotions, whose word pictures enliven the imagination and tickle the funny bone, whose characters are stalwart and picturesque and sometimes scary.  Yet in the midst of real life and real living and real relationship emerges a genuine and winsome love story between two people of honor and deep sensitivity, passion and joy, whose capacity to love just keeps on growing.  And even amid the sexual heat and tension, there is the discovery of great joy and a kind of cutting edge pleasing of one another that comes when people are more concerned with giving than they are with taking.  

I have to confess that I was absolutely "hooked" on this author and this series.  I went right to the internet and bought all the remaining books in the series, some of which I will share as time goes on.  None were a disappointment.  I loved Sabrina--a mother of deep care and commitment to her children, whose twin sons spent time taking care of her in so many little and delightful ways.   But my favorite was Gideon--a many who came home to a wife he didn't know, a man of honor who was willing to do right by his dead compatriot's sister-in-law, and found the joy of his heart and the light of his future days.  It's a marvelous love story and one that will vastly entertain historical romance fiction lovers.  It really shouldn't be missed and right now it's also a great bargain.  I give it a rating of 4.25 out of 5.

Life Lessons Aren't Always Easy -- "The Wrangler" by Lindsay Mckenna

Can a city boy make good in the Wild West? After Wall Street collapses, investment banker Griff McPherson trades in his suits and ties for Stetsons and cowboy boots. He returns to the Wyoming ranch he co-owns with his brother, but it's not exactly a happy homecoming. So to prove to everyone, including himself, that he belongs back in Jackson Hole, he takes a post as a wrangler on another ranch. Air force lieutenant Val Hunter has just returned to the Bar H ranch to help her ailing grandmother run the property. While it is full of unhappy memories, Val is determined to do right by her home. Her new hire is easy on the eyes and a tough wrangler to boot, yet her instincts make it hard for her to trust him. When a nefarious neighbor endangers her land, Val is forced to accept Griff's help-but will she finally be able to open her heart?

It is no surprise that contemporary romance writers take their cues from all that is going on in today's world and with the significant down-turn of the world economy, there are stories galore to be told. But there is also another truism that surfaces often in romance fiction and that is the fact that one can never really "go home."  The hometown is different--even when it seems to have not changed--and people are different.  Every new person who comes to town changes that community just a little.  Nothing is ever quite the same.  In the case of this hero, there is absolutely no welcome mate put out for him.   Griff hoped and planned on being welcomed by his brother, but no place awaited him.  He had ignored his brother in the fat-cat days of his financial successes, he had even turned down his brother's plea for financial help to save their family's ranch, and now he is picking up the pieces of his own life.  He's barely holding it together--working a low-paying job, looking for odd jobs on the side, hoping for a better ranch job to come along so he can at least keep body and soul together.

The heroine of this story is another unwilling returnee to Jackson Hole--an air force pilot of note whose family obligations have now intruded on her personal life path and she is back on the ole homestead.  She really loves her grandmother, but this isn't quite the future she had planned.  The real heroine of this story is, in my opinion, the grandmother.  Now she certainly isn't involved in the romance part of the story--an elderly rancher who is as sharp as a tack, who knows the ranching business forward and backward and also knows how to invest wisely.  She's now been hampered by a bad hip and resulting surgery, and yet that doesn't mean that she is ready to pack it in.

This is a story of redemption and recovering one's perspective in life.  It is teaching three people the wisdom of backing up, taking a long look at the "big picture" and coming to some different conclusions.  It is also about finding ways to rebuild bridges of relationship that have been seriously damaged and finding that in the middle of hard times and personal chaos, there still lives honor and integrity within good people.

I have read one of the previous novels in this series and found it to be so good that I was excited to move on to this next story.  I happen to like cowboy romance a lot anyway, but the story of the two brothers, their anger and disconnect, their need to find their way back to each other is an important part of both these stories.  This story is especially compelling in teaching the lesson that circumstances don't shape character;  they reveal character, and it is the important lesson that Griff has to learn about himself and those around him.  He also finds out that all those Wall Street skills he thought had no part of his life anymore really were just sitting there waiting to become vital once again, even if the setting is hundreds of miles West of New York City.

Good writing, good plot, good characters and when they are all put together they come out as a compelling and entertaining novel that cowboy romance lovers will enjoy.  It's worth the time to read and I even think readers may want to go back and read some of the novels that appeared earlier in this series.  I know that will be true for me.  I give this a rating of 4 out of 5.

This novel is published by HQN Books and is being released in June, 2012.

I Don't Know If I Want Your Help . . . "Colby Law" by Debra Webb

To solve the most heinous murder in Texas history, Colby investigator Lyle McCaleb has an unusual mission: find and protect the killer's long-lost daughter. The complication: she's tough, gorgeous rancher Sadie Gilmore—Lyle's first and only love. And now the mysterious past she barely remembers is threatening her very existence.

Lyle regrets leaving Sadie broken-hearted seven years ago. And as he investigates and gets deeper into danger, he finds it almost impossible to maintain his professionalism around her. But another dilemma threatens their newly rekindled relationship. Can Lyle regain Sadie's trust while concealing the secret that may devastate her?

According to the publisher's blurb, this is the 48th book in the Colby Agency series, and while this is the first book in that series that I have read, I had no difficulty making heads or tails of the story.  It was kind of a reminder of some of the really awful serial killers in recent years--John Wayne Gayce or the buy in Wisconsin or the one from Seattle--the Green River Killer--all are terrible and that was the sense I had about Sadie's father, a man who was on Death Row and who was seeking to gain some favor from the Colby Agency investigator.  As if that weren't bad enough, the killer's wife, also accused of the murders, has now been released and she is sort of a loose cannon in the story.  All the way through the reader is not really given any help in deciding if she is one of the good guys or indeed one of the killers who has just managed to escape prosecution.

Anyway, this is a very well-written story, one that is full of the tension that goes with a very good murder mystery as well as lots of sexual tension.  There is tension between Sadie and her adoptive father, a man who wants to control her and whose control she battles every step of the way.  The old wounds of Lyle's defection seven years earlier are still very raw, and so there is a great deal of upset and people rubbing each other the wrong way present in this story.  But it is not the kind of adversarial wrangling that drives me crazy in some romance novels.  All of the tension here is such that it all  makes sense and as the story progresses, there are patches of relief--sort of light in a dark sky, and even amid their working to get past the hurts of the past, Lyle and Sadie find some common ground that makes his presence as her protector slightly more tolerable.

Throughout this story, however, there is that current of on-going evil, sort of the ripple effect that the evil perpetrated by these serial killers continues to invade the lives of Sadie and others in the story.  And the sadness for me is that no matter how hard the innocent try to get away from the evils pushed off on them, it just keeps rearing its ugly presence.  And make no mistake:  there are innocents here who didn't even know about the crimes when they were committed.  

This is released in the Harlequin Intrigue imprint, and while lots of folks still have a bit of prejudice of the Harlequin books -- left, no doubt, because of the cookie cutter novels that were published in the past, still this is a very compelling work and one that is truly readable and which has lots of twists and turns.  It was a very good reading experience, and for those who like some mystery mixed in with the romance, this will do it for you.  I give it a rating of 4 out of 5.

This novel was released by Harlequin Intrigue in May, 2012.

The Past or The Future?? "The Cowboy Takes A Bride" by Lori Wilde

Ex-champion bull rider-turned-cutting-horse cowboy Joe Daniels isn't quite sure how he ended up sleeping in a horse trough wearing nothing but his Stetson and cowboy boots. But now he's wide-awake, and a citified woman is glaring down at him. His goal? Get rid of her ASAP. The obstacle? Fighting the attraction he feels toward the blond-haired filly with the big, vulnerable eyes.

When out-of-work wedding planner Mariah Callahan learns that her estranged father has left her a rundown ranch in Jubilee, she has no choice but to accept it. Her goal? Redeem her career by planning local weddings. The obstacle? One emotionally wounded, hard-living cowboy who stirs her guilt, her heartstrings, and her long-burned cowgirl roots.

It has been said that it is impossible to keep a good woman down.  So it is with Miriah Callahan, the daughter of a Texas cowboy who was obsessed with cutting horses, and who  made the choice, early in Miriah's life, that he would rather have the horses than his family.  As far as the citizens of Jubilee, Texas were concerned, "Dutch" Callahan was the salt of the earth and one of the best men who ever walked the planet.  But then again, Jubilee was the world's cutting horse capital.  Miriah's "take" on Dutch was considerably different.  She remembers his leaving one day to go see a man about a horse, and she only saw him once more in her life--when she was 14 years old--and then he was dead.  Her anger and resentment at being abandoned and not loved, at knowing that he chose all those horses and all these other people over her and her mother, knows no bounds.  But coming to claim her inheritance was the only things she could do.  

This is a wonderful cowboy romance full of real, deeply flawed, both hurting and happy people who happened to have a view of living and friendship that is quite different from Miriah's.  She's the big city gal from Chicago and they're just small town folk who have built their lives around the joy of horses, and cutting horses in particular.  It is the story of one woman's life journey that forces her to look at herself and others with different eyes, who has to deal with her own sense of loss while not really understanding the clash between the grief over her dad as it clashes with her anger and sense of abandonment.  But there are others in this story who have loved deeply and lost, whose fear of that kind of pain keep them from venturing on in their lives, who seem content to love their horses and meet their personal needs in some superficial ways.  It is about life and death, living and loving and losing, about joy on a wedding day, and the deep sorrow and mourning of a funeral.  In other words, it is about real life.  

You won't have to be a confirmed fan of cowboy romance to love this story.  Ms Wilde has a long list of successes to her name and those who love good loving, good writing, and the riveting nature of a good story will like this book.  It is not a simplistic boy-meets-girl novel and there are triumphs and failures and crises that take the reader in some surprising directions.  So don't miss this one.  You'll be glad you gave it a go.  I give this book a 4.25 out of 5.

Ta

This novel was released by Harper Collins Massmarket in March, 2012.

Culture Clash . . . or . . . "The Sheikh's Bargain Bride" by Diana Fraser

Being trapped in a marriage of convenience in a desert kingdom, where duty and tradition reign as supreme as the sheikh, is the worst thing that could happen to freedom-loving Anna Whitman. However she has no choice but to agree to Sheikh Zahir Al-Zaman’s demands when he kidnaps her son.

Duty, loyalty and tradition are the driving forces in Zahir’s life. He’s fought for them all his life and now finds himself obsessed with a woman who appears to be the opposite of everything he values. In order to control his obsession with Anna he believes he needs to possess her. And he’s prepared to go to any lengths to do so—even using Anna’s child to blackmail her into marriage.

But Zahir will not force her into his bed; he has his strategies for seduction. Despite an intense attraction, Anna is not going to make it easy for him. Even when she begins to understand him, and his culture that seemed so restrictive at first, she won’t have a relationship with him based on lies. But how can she reveal her secrets when they will shatter the beliefs he holds most dear?

Freedom-loving--that's what all Americans are.  Yet for Anna, the idea of being independent and free to chart the course of her life was her first priority--or perhaps coming in second after loving and caring for her son, Matta.  Anna's marriage to Abdullah, Zahir's brother, has lasted only a very short time after discovering that he had married her only to cover up his homosexuality from his family.  Yet they remained best friends, even to the point that Anna continued to keep Abdullah's secret, even after his death by drug overdose and even taking the blame for his death, a blame that really was not hers at all.  Yet when Zahir used Matta to bring Anna to the desert, used her son to coerce her into marriage, Anna had no choice.  

This is an amazing novel of the clash between the American values we almost all take for granted with a culture that happily continues to this day, a culture that is based on an autocratic way of governing country and family and personal relationships.  As the Sheikh, Zahir was the last word in just about everything, but what Anna didn't know and what Zahir didn't tell her, was that he was absolutely obsessed with her because of the one night they spent together in Paris four years earlier.  Anna's anger at being forced into accepting Zahir's ultimatum did indeed gradually soften and she gradually came to realize that there was a sense of belonging available to her that she had never experienced before.  As a woman bent on becoming a kick-ass lawyer, however, she just couldn't see past the boundaries, past what she perceived as restraints personally and every other way.  

Anna's pursuit of independence came with a very hefty price, and the reader will find that plowing through all the layers of this story, of Zahir and Abdullah's family, of what it takes to be open to other ways of living and relating will draw one into the story in a deeply emotional way.  The writer has crafted the characters with a deft hand, allowing readers to literally sense the emotions, the connections or the disconnects, the strong maternal feelings and the erotic couplings that are a part of this romance.  Both Anna and Zahir are strong, assertive persons, people who have set a path for themselves and those around them and who are not content to just float through life letting others make their decisions for them.  Their difficulties were as profound as their love for each other, all of which were caused by deep emotions that had the power to enrich or disrupt, and the seeming bent they both possessed to misread and misunderstand one another.  Again, I had the strong sense that those feelings and miscommunications were as much a part of the culture clash as religion or family structure.  

Ultimately this story is about the power of genuine affection, respect and deep loving to re-order one's personal life view, to provide answers to some of life's deep longings, and to bring people together across significant barriers.  Anna and Zahir remained, in essence, who they were, but their emotional connection was the most powerful change agent in their lives.  Anna, who feared close emotional ties as the foremost enemy of her personal independence, and Zahir who believed that his early life as a warrior and desert fighter had killed his capacity to love -- each found a way to reclaim who they truly are.  How they managed that is at the core of the story and the stuff that makes this novel compelling and one that will not turn loose of the reader's mind and emotions from start to finish.  I give this delightful read a rating of 4.25 out of 5.

Fun With The Sun or The Solar Eclipse of 2012

Yep, that's what it looked like from our front yard last evening when we donned our protective eye wear and gazed at the heavenly phenomenon.  My last glimpse of a solar eclipse was almost 50 years ago when we were living in Cedar Rapids, Iowa with my hubby's folks after just returning from Germany.  I know the one years ago was a total eclipse and this was classified as an "annular" eclipse, but both were spectacular and I am delighted to have been in the part of the world that we could view it for a few minutes.

One of our friends drove all the way to Cedar City, Utah in order to see the 100% view while ours here in Southern California was "only" 86%.  Yet it was freaky to see how the brightness of the sun was dimmed and to watch the shadow of the moon creep across the face of the sun.  I watched a live feed on the internet for a while--it got tiring to keep my head at that angle, and yet it was about an hour before sunset so the angle wasn't as bad as if the sun had been directly overhead.

Just thought I would share my own excitement at being one of the "favored" ones.  I understand the last glimpse of the eclipse was somewhere in Texas before it was all over.  As one commentator put it:  "We have so many manufactured adventures--good books, video games, sci-fi films and paranormal kinds of stuff that everyone enjoys for their thrills.  This is one that nature gave us and it is every bit as good if not better."  Took the words right out of my mouth!