The Baby Bombshell (Wedded Bliss)

Rating:
Summary: The Cupid Committee strikes (out) again
Review: Raine Featherstone is busy running a ranch, so she is not too happy to receive a note from her former love interest and current rival Lucien Kincaid, demanding she meet him at the old line shack where they had had their single past intimate encounter. When she arrives she meets Lucien, who has come because of a similar note he claims to have received from her. Could the Cupid Committee be up to its matchmaking shenanigans again?
Well, of course it could. But even the Cupid Committee probably couldn't have predicted the bad storm that rolls in, stranding our star couple, or the tree that falls on the line shack, destroying almost everything and trapping Raine and Lucien in a large hole (conveniently without most of their clothes, which were washed away by the storm).
From this dubious beginning (I mean really, folks, settling mysterious notes is what we have phones for) things head mostly downhill. Our stranded lovebirds get carried away (again!), Raine gets pregnant, and they spend the rest of the book hashing out the various difficulties which have kept them apart--mainly a dispute over some land, and the fact that Raine blames Lucien for killing her grandfather. These conflicts are revealed in fragmentary and confusing ways, and it's only in the last ten or so pages of the book that the reader actually learns all of Lucien's supposedly noble and self-sacrificing motives for keeping Raine in the dark on several important issues.
Noble and self-sacrificing or not, Lucien, like Raine, is pretty self-centered. This book lacks the intrigue of the first book of the trilogy, and it lacks the humor of the second. A few moments of humor are provided by the antics of Raine's dog and Lucien's horse, but they're not enough to rescue this book. For a deeper read that touches on many similar issues and features a cowboy hero who really is one, try Margot Early's "The Truth About Cowboys."