Book 3: The Mountain Monroes
Rescued by the Perfect Cowboy
She came to Second Chance. He took a chance on love.
Art curator Sophie Monroe is overwhelmed with starting a new business and raising four-year-old twins. Needing help, the divorced mom hires cowboy Zeke Roosevelt as her interim nanny! French lessons and bookish pursuits give way to riding and roping. And scholarly Sophie falls hard for the strong, practical cowboy. Until Zeke reveals a secret that may prevent this temporary posse from becoming a permanent family.
Tropes: second chance romance, single mom, twins, cowboy romance
Excerpt:
Zeke Roosevelt had often heard it said there was nothing prettier to a cowboy than his horse.
Zeke was a cowboy, but he was going to have to disagree.
Sophie Monroe was beautiful. She had short, brown hair that tended to take a charge of electricity and float around her face like a halo. Her brown eyes were big and soft and when she was happy, they sparkled. She also had a sweet figure to match her sweet disposition.
In horse terms, she was a goer, always up for whatever challenge her twin boys threw at her, despite the fact that those kids were what his grandmother would have called, “hell on four-year-old wheels.” Those twins operated on batteries that never ran low. They were the reason Sophie never sat still and always looked exhausted.
“Careful now, boys.” Sophie descended the stairs at the Lodgepole Inn.
She and her sons were hidden from Zeke’s line of sight. It sounded like the twins were bunny hopping down the steps.
Sophie appeared, stopping on the first-floor landing in the stream of late winter sunlight coming through the front windows. She pushed up those red-rimmed glasses of hers and turned to monitor the bunnies. “One hand on the rail, Andrew. That doesn’t mean you can take yours off, Alexander.” And then she smiled at Zeke.
There was no way to deflect that smile. It hit him square in the face and dared him not to think of shamrocks and rainbows and pots of gold—all the things he’d wished for when he was a kid.
Status of his childhood dreams? Abandoned.
But back to the business at hand…
Sophie was definitely pretty, but she was off-limits to an unemployed, nearly broke cowboy with a severely broken leg. He’d introduced his truck to a tree in January and broken more than the leg below his kneecap. His truck was incapacitated, sitting in the repair bay of the garage next to the Lodgepole Inn, waiting for Zeke to come up with money for parts. Only Zeke had lost his job at the Bucking Bull Ranch the day of the accident. Unemployed, he’d been living off his savings and renting a room in Second Chance, Idaho, ever since.
Status of his bank account? Precariously low.
“Good morning, Zeke,” Sophie said as if the day had already revealed its pot of gold.
Zeke replied in kind, but Sophie had already refocused her attention to the twins and their progress to the inn’s common room. He ran a hand through his short hair, torn between being grateful Sophie didn’t return his interest and wondering why he seemed invisible to her.
Women didn’t use to ignore me.
Over the years, he’d been told he wasn’t a hardship to look at. Zeke backed up in his wheelchair. His leg was in a bulky walking boot, propped parallel to the floor to encourage healing.
He wasn’t looking his finest exactly.
Oh, yeah. That explained a lot.
He was missing his signature boots and a cowboy hat sitting firmly on his head.
Status of his pride? Precariously low.
It was hard to be studly when you could pull on only one boot. Although he’d graduated to a bulky walking brace, the doctor had recommended he keep his leg immobile as much as possible for another few days.
Patience for his injury? Next to none.
He was ready to make a run for it out of the Lodgepole Inn. Not that Zeke could afford to go anywhere. He had twenty-five dollars in his wallet. Precarious and pathetic, that’s what he was.
Now, Sophie. She came from money. Her generation of Monroes owned the small town of Second Chance. The Monroe name was attached to a movie studio, a yacht building company, oil rigs and a string of luxury hotels. She was from Philadelphia and had probably never faced bankruptcy in her life. Even worse, Sophie had a college education. She’d earned two degrees in art history, of all things. She might just as well have majored in Russian. Both areas of study were foreign to him.
The Story Behind the Story
My nickname for this book was My Cowboy Nanny. I thought it would fun to have a broken down cowboy who can’t read take the only job in town - a nanny for a hoity-toity woman and her precocious twin boys, who he’s supposed to be tutoring.
Cookies: the myth of Merciless Mike Moody is introduced in this book and runs its course through Book 7. I drop more clues in Books 4 & 5.
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