From Publisher’s Website

Can a girl ever have too many cowboys?

No sooner does pint-sized spitfire Jill Cleary set foot on Fiddle Creek Ranch than she finds herself in the middle of a hundred-year-old feud. Quaid Brennan and Tyrell Gallagher are both tall, handsome, and rich…and both are courting Jill to within an inch of her life. She’s doing her best to give these feuding ranchers equal time—too bad it’s dark-eyed Sawyer O’Donnell who makes her blood boil and her hormones hum…

My Review:

Okay, Carolyn, my second favorite couple from your books is a three way tie! Trace and Gemma from Just a Cowboy and His Baby will always be my favorite but Lucas and Natalie from The Cowboy’s Christmas Baby , Finn and Callie from Cowboy Boots for Christmas, and Sawyer and Jill are in a very close second.

One of my favorite romance tropes is friends falling in love. While technically Sawyer and Jill are strangers who become friends almost from necessity, they do go from friends to a couple.

Like all of Carolyn’s heroines, Jill is smart, sassy, and isn’t afraid to kick ass. I love that being “dolled up” isn’t a priority. Like me, she is happiest in her Wranglers and boots. While very independent, Jill understands that being in a couple is about being partners and taking care of each other. It was a hard lesson to learn but she did. Sawyer needs a partner not a princess.

Jill came to Burnt Boot to help her two aunts out but quickly finds herself the center of attention in the the Brennan and Gallagher feud. One of her aunts, Gladys, has property that sits smack dab between the two feuding families, and has water rights that both families want. Bring on the hard core wooing and one up-man-ship. I’m sure Quaid and Tyrell are nice men but their courting skills need serious improvement. Hopefully they will find women, that they truly want, who will show these cowboys that money and land size doesn’t matter.

Sawyer is part of the O’Donnell clan that we met in the Spikes and Spurs series. He is the cousin of Finn and Gemma. This hard working cowboy comes to Burnt Boot originally to get away from his ex girlfriend, and to spy on his cousin Finn, but he ends up getting a foreman job on Gladys’ ranch. Because the feuding families want the ranch so bad, they each send a single lady after Sawyer so that Quaid and Tyrell have a shot at the heir of the property.

I was sad that we didn’t get to see Honey Brennan in this story. In Cowboy Boots for Christmas, Honey was sent after Finn. Her nemesis, Betsy Gallagher was in this story. I think the women in this feud spend more time fighting each other than actually wooing the cowboy they have been unleashed upon.

The feud between the Brennans and the Gallaghers crack me up. Probably because it is very easy for me to image a small town divided by one. Having grown up in a farming and ranching community that had one primary family, I’m sure that at some point in the history of the town there was a feud. But no feud will ever be as epic as the Brennan and Gallagher feud.

Sawyer and Jill make a great team. They truly complement each other well. Once they settle their minor dispute, they are a united front against the onslaught of wooing.

There were a few minor editing errors and the cover model doesn’t have the “soft black hair covering his bare chest”. (As Jill says: “… Little boys have bare chests. Men have hair. Hunky cowboys have just the right amount…”) Plus, I’m still baffled by the reasons the feuding families did a couple of things to Sawyer and Jill. However, this book deserves the rating I’m giving it.

The Trouble with Texas Cowboys is the second book in Carolyn Brown’s Burnt Boot series.

I give The Trouble with Texas Cowboys a 5 Horseshoe rating.

Publication Details:

Author Carolyn Brown
Title The Trouble with Texas Cowboys
Format Print
Length 332 pages
Publication Date January 6, 2015
Publisher Sourcebooks Casablanca
ISBN 978-1-4022-9608-6