You did it! We figured this one out! It is a truth universally acknowledged (by me for certain) that the Bitchery pretty much knows everything, and really, it's true. Scroll down to see the solution for this HaBO - and many thanks!
This HaBO is from PropellerBeanie, who is looking for two of the first category romances she ever read:
Hi Bitches! In the early 2000s a neighbor who was moving overseas left six grocery bags filled with contemporaries – Silhouettes, Harlequins, and other line romances – on my doorstep. Not being into contemporaries, I sniffed in ambivalence and thought I’d just donate them.
One or two on top caught my eye, and before I’d made it to the Goodwill I’ll be darned if I hadn’t zipped through several of those bags of romance titles. Wow! What had I been missing! I went through so many romance novels so fast I didn’t pay attention to lines or authors or publishers or anything like that. Eventually, my husband threatened to burn them if I didn’t get them out of the garage (we had a very small house and a growing family), so I did end up donating them, but I enjoyed them and am really grateful I had the opportunity to read them.
There are a few I would like to reread but all I have are snippets of details and plot lines. I guess I’ll start with the one that has stuck with me the most: A young woman gets pregnant by a guy she meets on the rodeo circuit. She shows up at his family’s remote ranch hoping to track him down. The ranch is run by rodeo guy’s brother who is not happy that #1 his brother ran off to the rodeo and left all the responsibility of running the struggling ranch to him, and #2 he now has the additional responsibility of his brother’s pregnant ex-girlfriend. He gives her a job and she works hard.
Of course, they fall in love over the course of her stay. They yearn for each other in silence while they try to locate the rodeo brother to notify him about the pregnancy. She knows she’s a burden and is not even sure the hero likes her. Despite knowing his brother is an irresponsible butthead the hero doesn’t want to move in on rodeo brother’s territory, so he keeps his distance. They locate rodeo brother when the heroine is due to give birth at any moment, and the unfeeling asshat basically tells the hero he doesn’t want anything to do with the young woman or the baby; he just wants to keep doing his rodeo thing.
I can’t remember how this information is conveyed to the heroine, but this is the part that has stuck with me all these years – she goes to town, buys a feather boa (I think it might have been a red one, but that might just be my imagination) which she hopes will make her look sexy to the hero despite being huge and ready to deliver a baby at any minute, and, with the help of that feather boa, she and hero consummate their love. The next day the baby is born, and the hero considers both the heroine and the child his.
Woooo! Give it up for feather boas! This book made me cry, and I never in my wildest dreams thought a short little line romance would evoke such strong emotions. I was hooked.
Am I allowed to ask about a second book, or is that breaking a bitch rule? Just in case, the second book I would like to locate is a romantic suspense.
A woman goes back to her hometown to help deal with some kind of family problem. Her sister is having an emotional breakdown (or maybe died after experiencing one). I think the sister’s husband was part of the plot, but I can’t remember if he was a bad guy or a benign secondary character who gave background info about the sister.
Hero (ex-hub or ex-boyfriend?) is also living in heroine’s hometown in seclusion. I might be getting plot lines and characters mixed up, but this is the image I remember most vividly:
The Hero has a house by a river, and to show his distain of his former corporate life he tied all his suit ties to the branch of a big tree by his house on the river. I can’t remember if I especially enjoyed this book, but that image of all the colorful ties tied to the branch of a stately old tree by a river bank and being gently swayed by the wind just won’t go away. I feel the need to exorcise it.
Thank you all for your help and thank you for this amazing website!
I usually don’t run double HaBO requests, but ties AND boas?! This was one magical bag of category romance! Do you recognize either of these books?
Well, I definitely remember the first one. I think the heroine’s name is Abby, but beyond that I can’t remember much. Does the 2nd brother offer to marry her to take care of her and the baby, or is that another (really, really similar) story?
Oh oh, I know the first one! It’s HIS BROTHER’S BRIDE, by Judith Bolton. There are about a dozen SuperRos that I hang on to, and that’s one of them. I’m surprised you don’t remember the part where the dog eats a huge pile of raw corn and the heroine has a pregnancy hormone flipout.
Yes! It is His Brother’s Bride (Men of Glory) by Judith Bowen. And the feather boa was hot pink, not the red I thought I remembered. Yes, I forgot much of the book’s details, including the fact she was pregnant with twins, but I remembered I loved the story. I just bought it for my Kindle and got giddy again while skimming it to check the color of the feather boa. Thank you for helping to reunite me with this wonderful book!
“he colorful ties tied to the branch of a stately old tree by a river bank and being gently swayed by the wind” I love the picture this drew in my mind. I surely hope someone identifies this book because this man sounds like my kind of guy.
Pregnant… with twins.. in her ninth month… and she does WHAT the night before she delivers????
Now THAT is a magic hoo-ha.
@Anony Miss, yes, that’s actually recommended at the end of pregnancy to help soften the cervix (I think). Honestly, I had a friend who climbed off her husband and said, “I feel funny, let’s go to the hospital.” Six hours later, baby girl.
Okay wow – around here? Second trimester? Bring it on. Third? Cut it off. Heh.
That is a super-somethin’.
@DonnaMarie sure, the oxytocin (?) (it’s 3 AM, I have no brain, whatever, one of those hormonal doodabers) can help put you in to labor. But IT’S JUST THE LOGISTICS I’M IMPRESSED BY. Or the flexibility. Or both.
Prostaglandins in seminal fluid. Prostaglandins play a pivitol role in contraction of the smooth muscle of the uterus and other changes associated with cervical ripening. The doc in the book explains this to Abby as a natural (and fun!) way to induce labor when she’s really tired of being pregnant with twins.
This is entirely unhelpful, but I remember that second book – or, at least, the ties in the tree. I can’t even begin to think what it is or who wrote it, though. I hope someone else knows it, because I’m really curious.
The second book sounds like somethng Linda Lael Miller would write.
The Linda Lael Miller suggestion led me to review her books, and I remembered reading some of them, but none fit the bill. I went on to look at some books I remembered reading around the same time, which ultimately led me to author Tami Hoag and the book I was seeking, Cry Wolf. I am rereading it and at the beginning of Chapter 16 I found the passage that had caught my imagination:
“The old brick house stood stately and alone, half hidden by trees and shrubbery that had been allowed to encroach during generations of neglect. From the branches of one gnarled live oak hung two dozen or more neckties, their tails fluttering in the slight breeze – a testimony to Jack’s abdication from the world of corporate law, she supposed.”
The subject matter of Cry Wolf disturbed me when I first read it (still does) – the heroine’s sister suffers sexual abuse as a child and early teen a the hands of their stepfather, protects the heroine from the his attentions, and as a result becomes very promiscuous as an adult. The heroine becomes a prosecuting lawyer to see justice done for innocent victims of crimes because of her guilt at both being unable to help her sister from the abuse and for being spared from it herself. Tami Hoag tackles subjects that tend to unnerve me, but she is a really good writer. This time around I am enjoying her writing style, her beautiful descriptions of the bayou and its residents, and her characters.
Very weird how that one passage stayed with me. I am also embarrassed by the amount of time I have spent tracking this book down. Thank you for the tips as I probably would never have found it since Linda Lael Miller and Tami Hoag weren’t anywhere on my radar. I also appreciate the help tracking down His Brother’s Bride. You all are amazing.
@ PropellerBeanie
Oh I’m so glad you found it! I’ve had this picture of that tree and those ties in my head ever since I read this.
Now I have to go and hunt up some Tami Hoag.