The Cowboy Says Yes: Rustlers Creek

by Addison Fox, Tim Paige (Read by)

Overview

Welcome to Rustlers Creek, where you’ll meet the cowboys whose hearts are as big as the Montana sky and the women who can’t help but fall in love with them. 

Hadley Wayne is known all over America as The Cowgirl Gourmet. A beloved star on The Cooking Network, the success of her show has turned her sleepy Montana ranching community into a Hollywood backlot and everyone knows all about her perfect life with her perfect rancher husband—but it’s not real.

Zack Wayne has never felt further apart from his wife, even while they play up an ideal marriage for the cameras. They’re living separate lives in separate bedrooms. The love he has for Hadley is still there, underneath mountains of resentment, but he doesn’t know if their marriage can last for much longer. He can’t keep up with the façade anymore, for the cameras or Hadley.

When their work forces them to take a break from the constant schedule of the set, they begin to rediscover who they are and why they fell in love all those years ago. If they can mend the hurts that brought them here, will they still want to say goodbye to their life together? Or will the cowboy discover he can only say yes to their future?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798200857159
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	04/26/2022
Series:	The Rustlers Creek Series , #1
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 5.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Addison Fox is a lifelong romance reader, always in search of her next happy-ever-after. Once she discovered she found as much joy writing about romance as she did reading it, she never looked back. Addison lives in New York with an apartment full of books, a laptop rarely out of reach, and a wily beagle who keeps her running. You can reach her at addisonfox.com where she always loves to hear from readers.

Editorial Reviews

02/21/2022

Fox (Undercover K-9 Cowboy) launches her Rustlers Creek series with this bittersweet treat. Hadley Wayne is TV’s Cowgirl Gourmet, a down-home Montana girl with a handsome cowboy husband and a flourishing culinary empire. But underneath all the glitz and glam is a deep pain: the memory of Jessica, the daughter she and Zack lost to a late-term miscarriage two years earlier. Since the loss, both Hadley and Zack have tried to push their pain aside, but all it’s done is push them further apart. When Hadley and Zack’s childless state becomes a national conversation, and events start dropping Hadley based on her proclamation that she no longer wants children, the pair are forced to deal with the elephant in the room. Can they find a way to move forward or is their marriage over? Despite the heavy topic, Fox keeps the pacing brisk, with an unpredictably twisting plot. The achingly real characters and their plausible conflicts make it easy for readers to sympathize with both husband and wife, and cheer for them to find a way back to happily ever after, whether that’s together or apart. Few readers will come out of this dry-eyed. Agent: Holly Root, Root Literary. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"Fox launches her Rustlers Creek series with this bittersweet treat... The achingly real characters and their plausible conflicts make it easy for readers to sympathize with both husband and wife, and cheer for them to find a way back to happily ever after, whether that’s together or apart. Few readers will come out of this dry-eyed." — Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2022-03-02
A celebrity couple attempts to get their unhappy marriage back on track.

Hadley Wayne has deep roots in the small Montana town of Rustlers Creek: It’s where she grew up, it’s where she met and married her husband, Zack, and now it’s where she hosts her popular Cooking Network show, The Cowgirl Gourmet. The show is successful beyond her wildest dreams, turning her into a household name and catapulting her and her husband and their ranch into the spotlight. It’s not that Zack resents Hadley’s success, but he feels a deepening chasm growing between them every day. They're both afraid their marriage is unraveling, but the lines of communication are completely down, and they're unable to fix what is wrong. When a business trip sends them to California, Hadley and Zack both hope that time away from the ranch will help them reconnect. Fox’s novel is full of angst and melodrama, with two other secondary romance plots: Zack’s parents experience marital difficulties, and Hadley’s producer falls in love with one of the cowboys on the ranch. Unfortunately, these subplots just serve to highlight the lack of progress between Hadley and Zack. Their emotional reactions, especially at the beginning, feel manufactured to create melodrama. The plot meanders for most of the book before scrambling to an unsatisfying and rushed conclusion.

This frustrating take on the “marriage in trouble” trope fails to deliver a convincing happily-ever-after.

Kirkus Reviews