Name: Taken By the Three Cowboys
Rating: 4.35 (8 reviews)

408 reviews45 followers

March 6, 2026

This one was kind of meh for me. I didn't really resonate with any of the characters and didn't really believe their attraction to each other. It was too many pages to really qualify as a novella but not enough to be a full length novel and that's to the story's detriment. These people needed more time to breathe. More time to fall in love. More time to show us who they really were. But we rushed to the ending and as a result I didn't really care. And the black moment at the end was so insanely stupid that I wanted to throw my kindle across the room.

We start the story with our heroine, Blake, unsuccessfully singing to an empty bar. A lawyer named Wade, who I'm guessing must the the hero of another book by these authors because he got way more page time and description than was necessary, walks in to tell her that her adoptive father has died and left her $50 million in his will. But there's a catch - she has to marry one of his triplet sons, Colt, Weston, and Maverick.

The men are just as screwed by this will because they've apparently got tons of money locked up in a trust fund and the will says they can't access it unless one of them marries Blake. Meanwhile, there's a developer sniffing around who wants to buy the ranch to bulldoze it and put up houses. They don't want to sell, but with their money tied up, the ranch is failing fast.

There's also this guy named Derek who is Blake's ex-boyfriend. He apparently stole a whole album's worth of songs that Blake wrote and recorded and released them under his own name. He got famous off of them and she got nothing because his dad is rich and was able to hire much better lawyers than her so her lawsuit went no where.

Blake comes to the ranch and immediately Maverick acts like a total asshole to her. I think he must have been the authors' favorite character or something because he got triple the page time of the other two. And, quite frankly, I fucking hated him. He was a complete asshole in this first meeting, calling her a gold digger and a whore who is only showing up for the money. He also is apparently some kind of, like, uber nerd? Who has a spreadsheet for literally everything and does the books at the ranch.

And THE ENTIRE BOOK the "banter" between Blake and Maverick involved making inane financial puns about how they were trying to get a good return on investment and protecting assets and other such nonsense. It seems that the authors thought this would be, just SO RELATABLE, OMG, that they saturated the entire story with it. Thanks, I hate it.

So you can imagine my shock when, on her first night at the house, Blake wanders into Maverick's room and ends up making out with him. I hated this. After he was such a jackass to her, the LAST thing I wanted to read about was him getting rewarded with a makeout session. And it made me lose all respect for Blake that she got hot and bothered for him.

I especially hated that Maverick consistently got the spotlight when the other two heroes had both had crushes on Blake from when they were kids. The story goes that the triplets were sent to boarding school and thus didn't grow up with the adopted Blake. But they did cross over with her for about a year when she was 18 and they were back home. Colt was so in love with her from afar that he still to this DAY carries a picture of her with him. And Weston apparently was so smitten that he took to writing songs and poetry about her. How much more compelling would it have been to read about those two finally getting to confess their feelings?

Well fuck you if you wanted to read about that because the author's favorite character, Maverick, needs all the spotlight. Can you tell this really irritated me? And even when Colt and Weston did get a chance to share their POV, it was all very tame. Just nothing for me to really sink my teeth into.

Anyway, Blake gets there and Maverick is a dick to her. They state about a thousand times that they need her to pick one of them to marry so all four of them can get their money. Then they all go to bed. Blake's heater somehow breaks during the night? I guess this ranch house doesn't have central heating? And she goes into what she thinks is Weston's room but turns out to be Mavericks. They do the "I'll warm you with my sexy body heat" thing and make out enough that she's got teeth marks on her neck the next morning.

Colt spots those teeth marks right away and can tell that Blake smells like Maverick's cologne, and he's pissed about it. This caps off many, MANY chapters of the brothers all bickering with each other. They all apparently want Blake to pick them, and don't like their competition getting close to her. Blake maintains throughout that she needs time and space and doesn't know who to choose.

Then they find out that the developer guy who wants their land had filed a bunch of legal challenges against the will and the property. None of them will succeed, but they do cost money to defend against - money they don't have as the ranch is hemorrhaging. They're basically told they've got 2 weeks to seal the deal with Blake or they'll lose the ranch.

Maverick steps up his seduction by taking Blake to a fair. There they make out and then they have sex on the hood of his car. Weston sees them at the fair and is jealous that they're walking around holding hands. So, next day, he drags Blake off to this waterfall that's his special place and they have sex in the water.

Colt decides to take a different tactic and says he's going to "court" her. He leaves her flowers and little notes and takes her with him to do ranch chores so they can just BE together. He tells her that he's looking to build a future with her, not just marry for the one year they need to satisfy the will. He also defends her against her ex who randomly shows up in town to say he wants her back and doesn't like being told no.

Maverick and Weston make snarky comments about Colt and his "courting" but Blake is touched by it because it makes her feel cherished in a way their wham-bam pursuit of her did not. This makes Maverick in particular very irritable because he thinks he played his hand incorrectly and will lose to Colt's more gentle approach.

The black moment happens when, late one night, Maverick drags the other two out of bed to very harshly say that they've got less than a week to get Blake to sign a marriage certificate or they're sunk. He's very harsh in saying this is all a business arrangement, they need her signature and nothing more. He's even got various prenups drawn up to protect the assets of whoever she marries. Colt and Weston keep interjecting that Blake is more than just a business arrangement to them but Maverick just brutally insists she's not because neither of them would have had the balls to pursue her if it weren't for the will.

Of course, Blake somehow overhears this whole conversation EXCEPT for all the parts where Colt and Weston declared their feelings for her. And she yells at them all for using seduction to make her think they cared when all they were after was her signature so they could access the money from the will. Then she storms off.

And I was just completely baffled. I mean, SHE FUCKING KNEW ABOUT THE WILL. That's the only reason she came back to the ranch. This isn't new information. Why is she acting like it's some kind of betrayal for them to want the money??? SHE ALREADY KNEW THAT!

She stays locked in her room, refusing to listen to anything the men have to say and vowing not to marry any of them. She's willing to walk away from $50 million and go back to barely scraping by getting quarters for playing songs in dive bars if it means not having to deal with the triplets. Sure, I believe that.

In reality, she would have icily picked one of them, gone to the courthouse and married them on paper, gotten her money, and then flown off to Zurich or Bali, or wherever for the next 365 days. After all, the will didn't say anything about her having to cohabitate with whichever brother she married. And exactly one year later she'd have had that brother served with divorce papers and then gone on to live her life as a wealthy woman. But here in fiction land, she's too proud to think practically, apparently.

So she saddles up her favorite horse and goes out riding, even though there's a bad storm on the way. Naturally she ends up getting thrown down a muddy hill when the horse loses its footing in the downpour. Her leg gets caught on something and "twisted in a way no leg ever should" and then she's stuck. Now, the way this injury was described, with the twisting and then her being in abject agony afterward, it's strongly suggesting that her leg is broken. But even as I was reading it, I KNEW it would turn out to only be sprained because having a broken leg is really inconvenient when you're trying to have sex and we definitely had to have at least one more sex scene before the end of the book. And sure enough, I was right.

Anyway, the men are out looking for her in the storm and Colt finds her. Somehow they've even managed to get a helicopter involved and she's quickly flown to the hospital. While she was laying in the rain, wondering if she'd die, she'd undergone the religious experience of realizing that she loved all three men and should have let them "explain" what they were talking about before running off. Even though there really isn't anything to explain since she ALREADY KNEW about the terms of the will before she even got there.

At the hospital, once they're alone together in the VIP suite, Blake insists on having sex with Colt because he's the only brother she hasn't slept with yet. Maverick and Weston arrive while they're in the middle of it and she invites them in, saying she can't choose between them and she wants them all as her husband. They just agree and that's that.

Fast forward a few days and they're entering the courthouse so she can marry Colt legally, but all three of them in her heart. Then they go back to the ranch and have the one and only multi-person sex scene. Skip to two years later and Blake is four months pregnant. They're all the picture of wedded bliss, and the men surprise her with a fully functioning recording studio that they somehow had built in their house without her knowing about it. Then they show her that her ex went on TV and confessed to stealing her songs so now Nashville is calling. HEA.

All in all it was just kind of tame and boring for my tastes. None of the men were what I'd call swoon-worthy. Maverick was a dickhole who rambled on about spreadsheets which is not something any functioning adult male has done in the history of the world, ever. And even if such a man exists, he's not the kind of guy I want to read about in my recreational time. Weston was kind of weak overall. He also wrote songs so that should have given him common ground with Blake but he just didn't do it for me. And Colt was supposedly the leader but he got the least amount of page time and was the absolute last to make a move, despite him allegedly carrying a torch for her for 13 years. Oh be still my heart. Truly we've got the cream of the alpha crop here /s.

And we were pretty light on backstory too. Blake's adoptive dad had thrown her out of the house at 18 because he found her making time with some kid named Tommy. The dad said Blake was a gold digger just like her mother and then banished her from his life. They literally never spoke again. What was the story there?? Blake was always told that her mother had abandoned her at a fire station with just a post-it note saying her name was Blake.

I have so many questions about that back story. Why did the triplet's father adopt Blake in the first place? Did he know her mother? He can't have secretly been Blake's biological father or else his will would have set them all up to commit incest. So, what was his relationship to Blake and her mother? If it was nothing, then why would he accuse Blake of being just like her? Why would he accuse the mother of being a gold-digger? And how does Blake sleeping with this Tommy kid make her a gold digger? Was he the local rich kid? And why did her having a boyfriend make the dad so angry that he cut her off forever??

And what ever happened to that Tommy kid and his relationship with Blake? At one point in the story one of the men says the old man had been wrong because he’d seen the way she was with Tommy and knew that she’d really loved him. Blake is grateful for the understanding. But, like, if it was true that she and Tommy were in love, why didn’t she just go live with him when the old man kicked her out? Or if his family disapproved too, why didn’t they run away together? Or DID they actually run away together but later broke up? And if so, what caused the breakup? Or was Tommy bad news all along and had never cared about her so he ditched her as soon as she was disowned? Where is Tommy now? Does he still live in the area? Will they have to see him in town for the rest of their lives?

And what about Blake’s mother? Did anyone ever look for her? Is there backstory there? Like, if the old man had tracked her down only for the mother to demand a payoff or she’d challenge Blakes adoption, THAT would have given us a reason for him to call the mother a gold digger. But we don’t get that back story. We don’t really get ANY back story. There’s just too little meat on the bones of this one.

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Taken By the Three Cowboys

Berri Fox, Ellie Rowe

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Berri Fox

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