WISH UPON A COWBOY

A young widow fights to regain custody of her son while working as a housekeeper to the town heartthrob in this contemporary holiday romance.

Fresh out of jail for embezzlement, Harper Evans has taken a bus to Creedence, Colorado, to reclaim custody of her son, Floyd, from her mother-in-law. After the death of her husband and grandmother, Harper’s life began to collapse until her flighty mother offered her a bookkeeping job. The job was a cover for her mother’s embezzlement schemes, something Harper only realized when it was too late. When she's sent to jail for two months, she entrusts 8-year-old Floyd to Judith, her late husband’s mother. Though Judith readily accepts custody of Floyd, there is no love lost between the two women, and Judith isn’t sure Harper is stable enough to care for the boy. Though Judith is painted as a villain, readers may feel inclined to side with her given that Harper doesn’t have the emotional or financial security to take care of a child. Logan Rivers is running his family's ranch while his father handles business elsewhere, but the responsibility is larger than he can manage. He’s already run through a slew of housekeepers who misinterpret the job as a way of auditioning to become his wife. When he meets Harper after he had to fire another woman for making a pass at him, she strikes him as the perfect person to fill in over the holidays, given that her stay in Rivers Gulch is only temporary. Harper’s baggage eclipses everything else in the book, and though it’s obvious she wants to be a good mother, no family court would ever agree to put Floyd in her care until she can demonstrate she’s built a healthy environment for him. Logan is a sweet romantic hero but nothing spectacular. Think of him as the equivalent to plain white bread: bland but serviceable in a pinch.

Emotionally exhausting.