This RITA® Reader Challenge 2016 review was written by Carol. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Long Contemporary category.

Here is Carol's review:

This is a second chance romance with a very dark backstory and a pretty yummy beta hero. Trigger warning for spousal abuse and rape.

Sally Ryland is a widow who owns and runs Ryland Riding outside of Caribou Crossing, British Columbia. She was married for several years about seven years ago. She and her late husband bought and built the place, and Sally has maintained the business in the years since his death through incredibly hard work, a gift for teaching, and a love of horses and kids. When they met, Sally was a professional barrel racer on the Canadian rodeo circuit and at the top of her game. She left it thoroughly and abruptly to take up a new life with the man she thought was the love of her life. (He so wasn’t – not a spoiler.)

One day, not long after her assistant has quit, a very tired Sally hears a rig pull in and an old friend from the rodeo is in it. Ben Traynor is a team roper and a saddle-bronc rider with a busted shoulder from a bad dismount following a winning ride. He’s notionally on his way to his folks in Alberta to chill while his shoulder heals, but he’d run into Sally’s estranged sister and decided to drop by. Sally has been completely out of touch with her old friends and her family since shortly after her marriage and move to BC. In fact, she hadn’t even contacted them when her husband died. And she doesn’t leave the ranch. All of which strikes Ben as entirely out of character. A couple of years younger, Ben had a crush on Sally back in the day when her soon to be husband swept in, swept her off her feet, and out of sight.

When I decided I might do a RITA Challenge review and this book was available, I read the
opening chapters included on its Amazon page. I found an easy story for a horse person (who’s okay with rodeo) to fall into. Sally is a tough and likeable woman, who is still broken from the abuse she experienced in her marriage. (She suffers from, among other things, recurrent flashbacks to the abuse; that history is shown explicitly in this story.) Ben is a big hunk who wants to help make her life better, to help her bring back some of the joyful and outgoing barrel racer he used to know. He also admires her smarts, toughness, and skills as well as what she’s accomplished with Ryland Riding.

The story revolves around Ben’s visit and his patient attempts to understand Sally and what has happened to her. (He settles himself in as a one-armed assistant instead of continuing on to his folks – a feat he manages a bit indirectly but without disrespecting Sally’s authority or her wishes.) He quickly figures out that some man has physically and emotionally hurt her. It takes him longer to figure out it was the husband and the extent of the damage. In the background are the day-to-day operations of Ryland Riding – horses, lessons, boarding, and chickens.

I liked Sally and Ben and the secondary characters who eventually show up (mostly people
from Caribou Crossing who have their own books in the series). And I liked the book through to the end. (Indeed, I went directly from it to reading Gentle on My Mind, the third book in the Caribou Crossing series, which I might like even better.) The HEA is earned and believable. So, reservations? Only slight ones.

As much as I liked the characters and the story, one thing felt a bit off to me. Sally clearly has PTSD. She doesn’t leave the ranch at all. She hides in clothes too large for her, and avoids men whenever possible, and flinches in their presence, though she has made one male friend from Caribou Crossing. Her abuser isolated her, beat her, and brainwashed her into a Stepford wife. She still sees herself as deficient (he constantly told her she was in every way he could come up with). She is confused and distrusts her own judgment; she can’t figure out how she let him do it. And she has flashbacks. Though probably a long enough time frame in the end (there’s a couple of months break between the visit and the HEA), all the changes seemed to come a bit fast. (Ben is there for just under two weeks.) Perhaps not, since it had been some years and she’d been slowly opening up; still I kept wondering whether she could really come that far in such a short time. (There may be a hint of the sex-magic cure for what ails you.) Similarly, I didn’t quite believe that Ben was healing as fast as he was, but maybe I wasn’t appreciating just how high a bronc rider’s tolerance for pain is and how fast some people do heal . . .maybe. Nevertheless and notwithstanding my qualms, both Sally and Ben are still clearly healing when they get together and that’s a good thing.

So, if you like horses and can tolerate the darkness of the backstory, go for it. Backstory aside, this is a sweet and traditional romance, aiming ultimately at marriage and children. But it’s not cute or precious.

A note on the series. So far I’ve only read this and one other of the books. In this one
especially, the town has next to no role in the story. It was more present in Gentle on My Mind, but my impression is that Caribou Crossing is not quite as small a small town as most in the subgenre. Neither of the books I read had the “everybody up in everybody else’s business” vibe that makes me really crazy in real life and crazy enough in books that I usually avoid small town series. This series I’ll probably give another shot.