A Wife for Owen Chase by Kristine Rolofson (HT 842)

Suzanne Greenway is in Bliss, MT to cover the annual matchmaking festival for Romantic Living - the story is not quite the one she hoped for (that involved covering New England Thanksgiving traditions) but she'll cover the "cowboy orgy" (as we are told that she called it to her friends in NYC) as she's told.  She's already got an in, a meeting with the Hearts Club to help her find a bachelor to tail for the story.  The Hearts Club is a group of 4 old ladies who play hearts and make matches, 2 of them being descendants of the original matchmaker Horace Bliss, and this year they've decided Owen Chase their number 1 target, except he's not really interested in putting himself out there.  Owen is a single father, having inherited his two neices - one a baby and the other a teenager, and he's too busy running his ranch and keeping up with the girls to even date. 

Anyway, so Suzanne and Owen meet at the old ladies' tea and coincidentally enough (since the ladies were just talking about wouldn't it be nice to find a redhead for Owen since his baby has red hair) Owen makes a comment about wanting a redhead, "flirting" with Suzanne who is a strawberry blond.  They meet up a few times as Suzanne wants to do her article on him, and Owen just plain wants her.  And Suzanne, despite getting left at the alter not six months ago, wants him back.  Will it be just a fling or could it be love?

This is a pleasant, enjoyable read, very unproblematic if you want to sit back, relax and let the book carry you.  It's only if you stop to think about it that you wonder at the complete lack of understanding of who Suzanne was before she came to bliss - presumably she had to be slightly ambitious to move to NYC and land a job with a magazine, but now that she's met Owen, she's "suddenly very afraid she'd fall under the Bliss spell and end up barefoot, pregnant, and cleaning out a barn." But "what made matters worse, she hated wearing shoes, had a secret longing for children, and had spent every summer from age six to seventeen at a horse camp."  Yup.  And Owen, despite starting the book thinking he really just wanted to get laid (and I admired his honest!) soon feels "his heart may as well have just tumbled out of his chest and into her hands for safekeeping."  Yeah so I guess you could say on closer examination the whole simply country folk language doesn't work the best for me (and I must admit to being more skeptical about the author's cowboy books since I found out she's living in Rhode Island, my home state and about as far away from Montana as you can get).