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The Love of a Cowboy (Callister #1) by Anna Jeffrey - published by Onyx 2003
Quote:
When Texas beauty Dahlia Montgomery’s husband winds up dead in a car crash with another woman by his side, Dahlia is forced to face challenges she had never imagined. Not only had he been unfaithful, he left her broke and saddled with a small Dallas software company under investigation by the SEC and the IRS.
She handled all of it with her usual calm efficiency, but she had to take bankruptcy and abandon a promising business career of her own. With no other options, Shattered and depressed, she moved back to her small West Texas hometown to live with her father and help him in his mom and pop grocery store.
Two years later, her life still is going nowhere and she's miserable. She allows her best friend to drag her off to the Idaho wilderness to work on a surveying crew for the summer. The friend’s idea is for a different environment to elevate Dahlia’s mood and give her a different perspective on life. And it does. Just when she thought she would never meet another man she could or would trust, she runs into, literally, wealthy cattle rancher, Luke McRae.
Luke is the manager of a huge, family-owned, ranching dynasty, which includes thousands of acres of grassland and timber. Having found love in the wrong place as a randy nineteen-year-old, he’s now saddled with more than taking care of the ranch. He has an alcoholic ex-wife, with whom he has an ongoing feud over custody of their two teenage daughters, a mentally and physically challenged son who suffers from FAS and a mother who has no intention of letting him forget how he got into his predicament.
When he meets Dahlia, the new half-Filipino beauty in town from Texas, he’s in no mood for love. Sex is all he’s after. He usually satisfies his needs out of town, but the mix of beauty and brains he finds in Dahlia is hard to resist. They spend a lusty, romantic summer.
As thoughts of her start to fill all of his waking and sleeping moments, he begins to worry over what he’s going to do about her. He loves her, but bringing a woman who's an outsider into his family presents way too many obstacles. His solution is to cut and run.
Meanwhile, Dahlia's aged father suffers a sudden stroke and she's called to return to Texas immediately. Neither she nor Luke knows that when she leaves Idaho, she carries Luke's child. Months later, in a letter from her best friend, Luke learns she has given birth to a perfect son, a potential heir to the McRae dynasty. He’s driven to travel to Texas to try to recapture what he and Dahlia had through that fateful Idaho summer and to claim his son. That is, if she doesn’t send him packing all the way back to Idaho.
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