Category: audiobooks (Page 73 of 94)

Why I read it:  When I listened to Rocky Mountain Rebel recently, I realised I had accidentally skipped this book.  So I bought it and rectified the lack.

What it’s about: (from Goodreads)  Allison Parker needs a convincing excuse to come home to Rocky Mountain House, a hopelessly romantic reason that won’t let her mother suspect the truth—that Allison has discovered Mom is keeping a terrible secret from the family.

Gabe Coleman is struggling with two of the roughest parts of ranching: dealing with his bull-headed mule of a father and making enough to pay the bills. When his old friend Allison offers to help him develop his ideas for organic ranching—in return for pretending to be her fiancé—it sounds like the perfect set-up.

Yet the deception leads them in an unexpected direction, where their shared daily hells are erased by nights of heavenly distraction. It’s not supposed to be real, but once the gates are opened, there’s no denying they’ve found in each other a little bit of paradise.

To break free of the past and face the future, though, will take more than temporary pleasures. It’ll take putting their hearts on the line.

What worked for me (and what didn’t):  I enjoyed this one and I say this fondly: the set-up is a little fairly unbelievable. Allison’s mother is very ill but doesn’t want to tell the family. Someone has told Allison and she wants to come home but doesn’t want to let on that she knows. So, plan A is “pretend to be engaged to Gabe Coleman”.  Not, “I got retrenched from my job so I thought I’d come home for a while” or something else a little more realistic. Because what we want is the two protagonists in close proximity so the business of falling in love can begin, I could overlook some of the logic problems here. Gabe, to his credit, does at least think about what the deception might mean for his relationships with his (very large) family.  At base, there is a longstanding connection and attraction between the pair and the rest is just excuses. However, once the proximity begins, things progress a lot more believably.  There was a definite chemistry between the pair and but for logistics (they lived in different towns, Allison wasn’t planning on coming back and Gabe is very tied to his land), they would have started dating a year before I think.
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