Awhile back I did a podcast with Sarah were I lamented the lack of dairy farmer heroes in romance. I mean, there are plenty of cattle barons, but dairy farmers? Nope. I think a dairy farmer hero would be great—a guy who takes the time to warm up his hands before he milks? Hearts would melt.

Okay, I’m halfway kidding. I’m from Wisconsin, so farming, especially dairy farming, is kind of thing here. But I guess farming isn’t very sexy because it doesn’t appear much in contemporary romance.

I was intrigued by All I Have by Nicole Helm because it features a hero and heroine who are both farmers, and in direct competition with each other. They aren’t dairy farmers (well, the heroine’s family is, but she isn’t interested), but hey, close enough.

I mean, the heroine, is a girl after my own heart:

“What do you want on your toast? I’ve got peanut butter, grape jelly, honey.”

“Butter?”

“You want just butter on your toast?”

“I grew up on a dairy farm. I could eat plain butter. No toast needed.”

Hell, yeah! I’m a 2% milk, real butter, cheese-loving, I’ll-put-actual-cream-in-my-coffee kinda girl. What the fuck is fat-free half and half made out of anyway? Look at the ingredients. It’s like a chemical shitstorm.

Plus cheese is delicious. I once ate an entire loaf of Amish cheese-bread in a single sitting and the ensuring constipation was so horrific, I started making promises to Jesus if he delivered me through it.

Anyway, what impressed me was how much Helm managed to pack into 160 pages and how developed her characters were. Everything was fully fleshed, and the conflict was (both internal and external) was real.

The external conflict centers around the local farmer’s market. Mia Pruitt is buying up pieces of her father’s farm year by year, and her farmer’s market profits allow her to do that. She’s good at drumming up business—she offers activities for kids and free face painting, but she can’t compete with Dell Wainwright. Dell is a hottie and he’s willing to take off his shirt to lure women away from Mia’s stand.

My farmer’s market doesn’t have hot shirtless dudes, but it does have those little donuts made fresh and a guy who has a tank of live trout built into the bed of a truck and you can scoop out the one you want.

Mia remembers Dell as the arrogant jerk from high school. She’s painfully shy, labeled Queen of Geeks by Dell and his cool friends when they were teens. She hides behind baggy clothes and is happy to remain invisible. She suffers from a horrible case of awkwardness and verbal diarrhea. The farmer’s market has helped her come out of her shell:

The first year at the market, growing into her confidences, her ability to be around people without the label “geek” weighing her words had been amazing. Liberating. And every year had gotten better. Maybe she’d never entered social-butterfly territory, but nobody looked at her funny when she answered a question or offered change. She wasn’t making lifelong friends, but wasn’t a laughingstock either.

When Mia realizes that the guy who humiliated her in high school is stealing her customers, she fights back, and eventually starts a battle of the sexes. Every week she and Dell perform some task to see who’s better—hauling strawberries, moving bales of hay, doing pushups, etc. Their “friendly” competition drums up serious interest at the market.

It drums up Dell’s interest too.  He starts really seeing Mia, and he’s matured considerably since they were teens. He sincerely apologizes for his high school douchery. He realizes that he should avoid her, that they are competition, but he likes spending time with Mia, especially when she stops being prickly and starts warming up around him.

This story centers around two people with a common passion—farming—and their desire to continue to work the land their family owns.

Unlike Mia’s family, Dell’s father is super unsupportive. Dell spent a lot of time having fun and screwing off, and Dell’s father doesn’t believe his son is responsible enough to own the farm. Dell’s brother, Charlie, went into business, and is clearly the favored child in Dell’s eyes. Dell’s dad plans to sell the farm, and Dell is desperate to prove with he can earn enough to make his father consider leaving the farm in the family, not selling it to a developer.

I liked a lot of things about this book. I liked that Mia and Dell go from competitors to friends to lovers in a really natural way. There’s mutual attraction there, but it’s tempered by mutual respect (once they get past their initial bickering). I liked how they started to work together slowly—car-pooling to save gas money, buying seeds in bulk. I liked how kind Dell was to Mia, even when she had super awkward moments.

What I really loved was how developed the secondary characters were. Dell and Mia’s families really shape them. Dell’s dad is kind of an asshole, and so his brother Charlie, but not totally. They aren’t black and white. They just think they’re right and don’t listen to Dell. Mia’s mother is completely overprotective, to the point of probably having an anxiety disorder, and her father has some kind of social anxiety. It makes things really weird when the family learns Mia is dating her competitor.

I also liked that Helm addressed those initial awkward moments in a relationship. In romance novels heroes and heroines don’t have gas or bad breath or have to shave their big toes. Everything is perfect.

The second night Mia sleeps at Dell’s, she brings her retainer:

He looked at the bizarre instrument inside [the case]. “What the hell is that?”

“My retainer.”

“I’m sorry. We’re not sixteen. You cannot have a retainer.”

She flung her head back onto the couch. “I have a migrating tooth,” she mumbled, staring up at the ceiling.

“A what?”

“My tooth moves if I don’t wear my retainer. It will slowly inch its way back to the roof of my mouth and I can’t believe I just told you that. I’m never going to have sex again, am I?”

So if you like books where the nerdy girl grows up and the hot guy likes her or books where sexual tension sizzles across a market table brimming with cabbages, this is your bag. It’s a quick read, but an enjoyable one.

I’m going to go eat dinner now. Tomatoes from the garden and, you guessed it, mozzarella cheese.