Love's Second Chance

Shaye Lange has learned the hard way that a man professing love is not always what he seems. Concerned about what has happened to her, her cousin, Jim, gets her to move to Texas near family--and where REAL men are--to start over in her wedding consultant business and personal life. To that end he has helped her find an apartment she can call home, a business storefront she has successfully settled into, and introduced her to prospective clients among his business associates and friends. Jim also wants her to learn to ride and start dating again. Shaye has dodged him on both, her time spent on her business, and man-shy willing only to window shop as long as men, like store mannequins, don't make a move. When Jim pushes her in the direction of his friend, rancher and single dad, Cash Wilcox, who is looking for someone to help plan his daughter's upcoming home wedding, and whom Jim hopes will teach Shaye to ride, she is led to believe Cash likely won't make a move, given that a million women in six Texas counties have failed to rope him--not that they haven't tried. Shaye finds him a striking figure on or off a horse; and as he gives her his attention and time, she understands why he is not the kind of man you want riding off into the sunset. But she doesn't want to be played again, either. As she wonders whether or not she can trust that his interest is genuine, she ponders, when and if, how to kiss a man storied for not wanting to be roped. Cash Wilcox takes one look at Shaye's fancy painted fingernails, which probably never had been subjected to mucking out a horse stall, or much else ranch related, and tags her as the city businesswoman that she is. He'd been there, done that with his former wife. However, watching the sway of Shaye's long hair follow the sway of her hips, he decides babysitting her for his friend, Jim, might not be the chore he'd originally thought. Hiring her to help with his daughter's wedding also would provide him a dance partner after handing the bride back to her husband. Unprepared to be blown away, like a tumbleweed in a tornado wind, with Shaye's vision for his daughter's wedding and with Shaye's caring, steadfast though cautious personality, and interest in ranch life, Cash also finds she can stomp that little foot of hers and take right off, like a colt in fright and flight mode, and he has her to corral and gentle all over again. Aware, however, she is saving her ring finger for THE MR. RIGHT, he wonders, as a man who takes chances every day, whether he could breach her defenses if he kissed her, or even if he should.