Read an Excerpt
She started to pack but realized, quickly, that she really had no idea how she should dress for this odd adventure. The only thing she knew for sure was that she was going West—way West—into sartorial circumstances she was not prepared for. What did one wear in weather potentially ranging from blizzard to heat wave when meeting an aging female romance writer who just happened to be a cattle rancher? This whole crazy escapade was twisting her well out of both her comfort zone and her closet.
As she held up a series of disappointing choices before a mirror in her bedroom, she realized that the challenge was less that she didn’t have anything to fit the occasion but that she didn’t fit the occasion. Catherine was a twenty-eight-year-old woman with long dark hair, large brown eyes, full lips, a pretty face, and a shapely figure, although at that moment of self-conscious cataloging, she wasn’t so sure about any of it: her bones seemed a little too large, her hair seemed a little too wild, her skin seemed a little too pale, her eyes a little too round, her cheeks a little too wide. After confronting these exaggerated defects in the mirror, she moved on to other, more obvious reasons that she was the wrong woman for this job.
For one, she didn’t like romance novels, Western or otherwise, and, with the exception of books by Austen and the Brontë sisters, she never read them. To her, they offered little more than a collection of unrealistic characters pirouetting through unrealistic plots toward unavoidably happy endings. And yet, she was now expected to flatter a writer of this sort of romantic froth and get her to sign a book contract with a publishing company known for its discriminating taste.
And then there was California. The most memorable part of her one and only trip to the Golden State was the sunburn she’d cooked into her skin while sitting at an outside café with fellow book editors—in January. And she wasn’t just going to California; she was expected to find someone somewhere in cowboy country. Had she been a six-year-old boy, this might have been a dream adventure, but Catherine found nothing particularly interesting, attractive, or compelling about either cows or the men and women who pushed them around.
The most annoying thought, however, was that this really wasn’t her job. She wasn’t an acquisitions editor, she was a copy editor who much preferred working with contract-settled manuscripts than searching for that tiny shiny needle in the immense haystack of mediocre prose. In short, had the mission she’d been given not been so vitally important to her job, to the job of her many and much-loved coworkers, and to the very survival of Banter House Books, she wouldn’t have agreed to her boss’s request that she fly out to California and look for a reclusive romance writer in some isolated cow pasture.
But she had said yes, and now she could do nothing but pack a few marginally acceptable pieces of clothing, her toiletries, a small container of Dramamine, two phone chargers (she invariably lost at least one wherever she went), and four books—the biggest and pinkest being a copy of Rancho de Amor. She would do what she told Vito she would do. And anyway, she briefly reflected, whatever it was, it was going to be different, which meant it would push Ralph and her own romantic disappointments out of her mind for a few days. With that thought in mind and her bag ready to grab before the crack of dawn the next morning, she rushed out to join a handful of friends at their monthly book group.
