When I return home to my family’s ranch as a freshly divorced single mom, I expect all the usual challenges. I’m ready for the furious teenager and steeled for the small town gossip mill. I’m even prepared to be back in the thick of Stockton drama. The kind that has me helping my brothers patch bullet wounds and rebuild fire-ravaged family businesses.
What I’m not prepared for is seeing my brother’s best friend, the man who broke my heart years ago, back from the dead, and standing in the family kitchen laughing with my daughter.
Our daughter. Not that he would know.
He’s nothing like I remember. The soft-spoken ranch hand my father took in like his own is a hardened cowboy, every bit as dangerous as my brothers and twice as charming. My traitorous heart even threatens to thaw when I see him standing at the end of the aisle, hat in hand, wearing a heart-stopping grin.
Unfortunately for him, I’m only walking down it to secure a legacy my family desperately needs. Because once my heart is broken, I never forget.
Any path to forgiveness would involve him crawling on his knees over broken glass. A challenge he apparently sees as a silver lining.
But my secret isn’t the only one we uncover while we’re digging up the past, and the threat that follows has us racing against time and facing impossible odds.
Odds he’s determined to beat, come hell or high water.
HIGH WATER, the fourth dark western romance novel in the The Quiet Horsemen series by Maggie Rawdon.
Smokin’ Hot Slow Burn Second Chance
What a ride this series has been! HIGH WATER is the grand finale to the The Quiet Horsemen series and it’s an excellent send off. The first three books follow the Stockton brothers as they find love. Woven into their drama is a decades-old mystery surrounding ancient relics and the bad people who would kill to possess them. People who have killed to possess them. Now, in the fourth and final book of the series, our main character is Aspen Stockton, the sister of the family, and Bishop, a tight family friend that hasn’t been seen in years.
We see them come face to face for the first time at the end of the third book and HIGH WATER picks up right at that moment. It’s obvious that both of them are stunned speechless, but for completely different reasons. She looks like she’s seen a ghost because he’d been presumed dead for fifteen years. He looks like he seen a ghost when he gets a glimpse of the daughter for the first time because he had no clue they had a child together (it’s in the book’s description, this isn’t a spoiler). To add insult to injury, upon seeing his daughter for the first time, Bishop then disappears for three months again, pulled away by his job as a mercenary. Upon returning, he does so with the mission of finding out the truth about Aspen’s daughter. And so kicks off their second chance at love.
But, MAN, Aspen does not make it easy on him. With good reason, but still… Our FMC is a strong woman. Strong willed. Strong opinions. Their history is rocky. A lot of water has passed beneath their metaphorical bridge and she’s got big trust issues. Life didn’t stand still while he allowed the world to believe he was dead. She was married to a man who was a father to their daughter. That marriage is now over and Aspen’s #1 concern is trying to limit the traumatic impact of the split and Bishop’s reappearance on her teenage daughter.
Aspen and Bishop’s story is a fun push and pull between two very stubborn/strong personalities, and he pulls out all the stops to get his second chance with her. If you’re into grand gestures with super-deep personal sentiment, this is your book. Bishop is the king of making the reader say, “Awwwwwwwwwwww, oooooooooooohhhhh myyyyyyyyyyyyyyy gaaaaaaaaaaaaaawd!” Every time you turn around, he’s confessing some memory he held onto like a life raft or trinket kept close just because it reminded him of her and you will melt, over and over again. And hot on the heels of all that melting is scorching hot spice. There is a fire between them that you see right away even though their second chance is a slow burn.
And the mystery around the relics! We see a lot more twists and turns where this is concerned but we finally, finally get some real answers. And the story is soooo much bigger than we realized. HIGH WATER brings a satisfying end to a crazy winding the road the author has been building up for four books.
I also loved that we see everyone again in this book. Ramsey is in and out because of football obligations but HIGH WATER really does see the whole Stockton clan come together to bring everything full circle. I loved this book. It’s a perfect end to the whole story. This series was my first dark western romance read and it did not disappoint. HIGH WATER was an excellent ending! 5 enthusiastic stars!
Spice Level
🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
My Rating
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Mercenary Ghost MMC
Stubborn Archeologist FMC
Single Mom
Secret Child
Secrets From the Past
Slow Burn Second Chance
Teenage Sweethearts
Organized Crime Family
Dark Western
Marriage of Convenience
BDSM Elements / Switch Play
Should this email get cut off due to length,
you can visit the my blog to get all of these reads!
Wishing you many dark fantasies & dirty dreams!
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The review copy of this book was supplied by the author (via The Smuthood) in exchange for a fair and honest review.
MAGGIE RAWDON loves books, travel and wandering through museums. She lives in the Midwest where you can find her writing on her laptop with her two pups at her side, in between binge watching epic historical and fantasy dramas and cheering for her favorite American (and European) football teams on the weekends. She loves writing dirty athletes and smart women and has a soft spot for writing characters who banter instead of flirt.
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