Title: Taming the Damaged Billionaire Rancher
Author: Olivia Steele
Date: 2023
Quote: "My heart skips a beat when I lock eyes with the one person I had trusted who walked out of my life five years ago."
Whew. How often do reviewers get to write that, even for one individual reviewer, a book moved too fast, didn't include enough details, left too much to the imagination?
If more of them review this book, I think more of them will have that rare pleasure. This is a short, short novelette. We never even visit Chris's ranch. We see the emotional scenes--Annabelle quarrels with her father and attaches herself to his younger, divorced friend Chris; Annabelle bristles when Chris backs away without having violated what was presumably her father's trust, sooner; Annabelle is getting comfortable in Chris's condo in the city when his ex-wife barges in, storms out, but is reconciled with him while readers are turning the page; Annabelle and Chris have sex before the wedding, with mention of unmentionable body parts; Annabelle and Chris have met again because they were involved in a very public-spirited legal case, but we never see them working on it, we're only told they've won. We don't see Annabelle and Chris doing anything but feel and, without some grounding in their thoughts and actions, their feelings don't mean a dang thing to me. They're not characters; they're puppets in a sex education course--all they actively do is run on and off the stage and bump bodies.
Well, it's a romance. You know how it's going to end. You're reading it as a marital aid. So maybe all you were going to read were the emotional scenes anyway. In that case you might appreciate a novel that skips all the effort to make characters in a romance seem believable as based on human beings. If so, Taming the Damaged Billionaire Rancher is for you, even though, from what we see of them, Annabelle is more damaged than Chris, Chris does more of the "taming," and it's even possible that Annabelle is the one who's inherited a ranch she never thinks about--neither of them does any actual ranching...Whatever, de gustibus, and all that.
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