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Cadence Creek Cowboys #1
The Cowboy's Code
He'll do anything to protect the ones he loves...
Social worker Angela Beck has too much to do to wait around for a cowboy who’s all charm and little substance. Setting up her women’s shelter means everything to her. Trouble is, she needs the support of Sam Diamond and his family to get the project off the ground. And that means working together…
Sam has always loved a challenge, and the sharp-tongued Angela has him on his toes. As they work together to make the shelter a reality, he discovers the warm, vibrant woman beneath the efficient exterior. She might just be the kind of woman he’s been waiting for…
But trusting doesn’t come easily to Angela—she’s learned to count on herself and not lean on others. When Angela’s painful past resurfaces, Sam knows it’s time for him to step up and be the man she needs—and hopefully win her heart.
Social worker Angela Beck has too much to do to wait around for a cowboy who’s all charm and little substance. Setting up her women’s shelter means everything to her. Trouble is, she needs the support of Sam Diamond and his family to get the project off the ground. And that means working together…
Sam has always loved a challenge, and the sharp-tongued Angela has him on his toes. As they work together to make the shelter a reality, he discovers the warm, vibrant woman beneath the efficient exterior. She might just be the kind of woman he’s been waiting for…
But trusting doesn’t come easily to Angela—she’s learned to count on herself and not lean on others. When Angela’s painful past resurfaces, Sam knows it’s time for him to step up and be the man she needs—and hopefully win her heart.
203 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 1, 2012
44 people are currently reading
139 people want to read
About the author
Donna Alward
286 books693 followersSince 2006, New York Times bestseller Donna Jones Alward has enchanted readers with stories of happy endings and homecomings that have won several awards and been translated into over a dozen languages. She’s worked as an administrative assistant, teaching assistant, in retail and as a stay-at-home-mom, but always knew her degree in English Literature would pay off, as she is now happy to be a full-time writer. Her new historical fiction tales blend her love of history with characters who step beyond their biggest fears to claim the lives they desire.
Donna currently lives in Nova Scotia, Canada, with her husband and cats. You can often find her near the water, either kayaking on the lake or walking the sandy beaches to refill her creative well.
Find out more at www.donnajonesalward.com
Donna currently lives in Nova Scotia, Canada, with her husband and cats. You can often find her near the water, either kayaking on the lake or walking the sandy beaches to refill her creative well.
Find out more at www.donnajonesalward.com
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
July 13, 2013
Another great story by Donna Alward. This is the first in her Cadence Creek Cowboys series. I read several of the others not realizing they had a prequel. This was as good as everything else she's written. Donna has a nice way of getting you to know her characters and feeling their real emotions. I love her strong heroines and tough heroes who aren't afraid to become a bit softer to fight for the women they love. The rural setting adds to the atmosphere making for a feel good book. I've come to discover you can't go wrong with Donna Alward.
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December 27, 2014Miniseries: Cadence Creek Cowboys
Category: Classic Romance
Category: Classic Romance
April 3, 2017
I'm really surprised at how many glowing reviews this book has gotten. Almost to the point where I wonder if people feel like they HAVE to give it a good review because it deals with a woman who has been abused and if they dare say anything against it they'll be savaged in the comments section for not being sensitive to the way abuse impacts the victim's whole life. It's okay everyone, Angela isn't real. You don't have to worry that you're being insensitive to her situation because she's a fictional character. You can go ahead and judge the book just like you would any other - on its merits as a work of fiction.
And in my opinion, as a romance novel it's just not that good. The book is about twice as long as it needs to be because nothing much is happening. To say this romance was a slow boil is to do a disservice to the phrase. It was more like "never boiled but did get slightly tepid". Sam and Angela start out at odds with each other, then get friendly, then she runs away, then when something happens and she needs him, she calls him and he comes running, then she pushes him away again, then he comes back. The end.
And in between those very few plot points were incredibly long stretches of Angela's highly repetitive and yet totally uninformative inner monologue. This was the main problem I had with the story. For about 9/10 of the book we listen to Angela thinking over and over and OVER again that she just can't have a relationship with Sam. It's impossible. It just can't happen. Even when she starts to have feelings for him she insists to herself that they can just never be together.....but she never explains WHY. She thinks extremely oblique things about her abusive past, but never explains to the reader what actually happened in that past that makes her feel she can never get involved with anyone. And that was a mistake on the author's part. It makes Angela's actions feel completely without justification as we slog through chapter after chapter of her thinking about how nice and attractive Sam is but then insisting they could never be together.
When Sam invites her to his family's ranch for dinner, Angela has a wonderful time and thinks about how amazing and warm their family is and how much she'd love to be a part of it. And then Sam makes it clear he wants to pursue a relationship with her and she insists it can't happen. When he asks for an explanation she can't give one, not even to the reader. She just says "You don't understand!!" and Sam says "No, Goddammit I don't!" And I as the reader felt like saying "NEITHER DO I!!!" It was one thing to keep the details of her abusive past from Sam, but to keep it from the reader just made for a frustrating read about a heroine who looked at the amazingly generous man she'd fallen in love with and yelled "stay away from me!!!" for no discernible reason.
You can't just say "Angela can't have a relationship because she was abused in her past" and expect that to cover things. The fact that she was abused doesn't by itself explain who she is today. That's like saying that Bruce Wayne became Batman because his parents are dead. Dead parents doesn't by itself = donning a cowl and fighting crime at night. You need the explanation of the parents being murdered in cold blood by Gotham's criminal element right in front of young Bruce to understand why he created the Batman alter ego. I needed more explanation of Angela's past in order to accept her current behavior as justifiable. I needed to connect to her emotions surrounding the abuse. To hear about how exactly her past ordeal affected her. Shown her fear at the idea of trusting someone enough to be vulnerable, etc..
I've read books before about women who'd survived abuse and how that made it hard for them to have a relationship. But those other books did things like show the heroine flinching at loud noises, or looking at ordinary items and imagining how they could be used as a weapon, or checking out windows as potential escape routes etc. Their emotional scars from the abuse were evident in everything they thought and did because their view of the world was fundamentally different. And when something spooked them, the way their heart raced and adrenaline spiked and so forth were all described so I could feel their terror right along with them.
That doesn't happen with Angela. She doesn't really behave like I'd expect someone who'd suffered physical abuse would behave. She never, for example, looked at Sam's incredibly powerful physique and thought about how much damage he could do to her if he turned violent. She never thought about how her ex-boyfriend had started out a smooth-talking charmer just like Sam but then turned ugly. We're being asked to believe that her abusive past is the lone reason for all her decisions in the story, and yet everywhere else she behaves as if it never happened. Basically she was a cardboard cutout of an abuse survivor. There's the superficial resemblance, but no depth. I couldn't care about her history of abuse because for 90% of the book I didn't really KNOW about it and I was never made to FEEL what Angela should have been feeling. And in the absence of that connection, all we're left with is a very slow-moving book about a woman who runs away from the fabulously handsome, understanding, patient, rich man who loves her....for reasons she can never explain.
I liked the beginning of the book best because even though Angela and Sam were fighting with each other, her actions actually made sense. Her reactions to his self-important swagger and dismissive snobbery about her cause were completely understandable. But when she and Sam stopped fighting, all that went away. The rest of the book is Sam bending over backwards to try to support Angela in every way and tell her how wonderful and fabulous she is, while not pushing her to take their relationship too far too fast, while Angela sends him mixed signals. Letting him get close, then telling him to get lost. Even in her inner monologue Angela frequently thinks about how this will be their last time together because that's just how it has to be. Or that she'll allow herself to have this moment with him to keep her warm at night as she soldiers on alone because it'll just never work out between them. She never gives actual reasons to him or us for why they can't be together and then later on frequently says that "her reasons for sending him away were right". What reasons?? You never explained what they were!!!! Seriously, the author should write speeches for politicians because she's perfected the art of saying a whole bunch of words that don't actually say anything at all.
I found the ending unsatisfying as well because it was just more of the same. Angela never really grew as a character and Sam just kept on being unbelievably understanding and patient with her. I'm trying to picture what their life together would be like if Angela always gets her way without ever having to explain her reasons and Sam just tiptoes around her, apologizing for things when he's never done anything wrong. It doesn't sound like an even partnership and that's just sad.
And in my opinion, as a romance novel it's just not that good. The book is about twice as long as it needs to be because nothing much is happening. To say this romance was a slow boil is to do a disservice to the phrase. It was more like "never boiled but did get slightly tepid". Sam and Angela start out at odds with each other, then get friendly, then she runs away, then when something happens and she needs him, she calls him and he comes running, then she pushes him away again, then he comes back. The end.
And in between those very few plot points were incredibly long stretches of Angela's highly repetitive and yet totally uninformative inner monologue. This was the main problem I had with the story. For about 9/10 of the book we listen to Angela thinking over and over and OVER again that she just can't have a relationship with Sam. It's impossible. It just can't happen. Even when she starts to have feelings for him she insists to herself that they can just never be together.....but she never explains WHY. She thinks extremely oblique things about her abusive past, but never explains to the reader what actually happened in that past that makes her feel she can never get involved with anyone. And that was a mistake on the author's part. It makes Angela's actions feel completely without justification as we slog through chapter after chapter of her thinking about how nice and attractive Sam is but then insisting they could never be together.
When Sam invites her to his family's ranch for dinner, Angela has a wonderful time and thinks about how amazing and warm their family is and how much she'd love to be a part of it. And then Sam makes it clear he wants to pursue a relationship with her and she insists it can't happen. When he asks for an explanation she can't give one, not even to the reader. She just says "You don't understand!!" and Sam says "No, Goddammit I don't!" And I as the reader felt like saying "NEITHER DO I!!!" It was one thing to keep the details of her abusive past from Sam, but to keep it from the reader just made for a frustrating read about a heroine who looked at the amazingly generous man she'd fallen in love with and yelled "stay away from me!!!" for no discernible reason.
You can't just say "Angela can't have a relationship because she was abused in her past" and expect that to cover things. The fact that she was abused doesn't by itself explain who she is today. That's like saying that Bruce Wayne became Batman because his parents are dead. Dead parents doesn't by itself = donning a cowl and fighting crime at night. You need the explanation of the parents being murdered in cold blood by Gotham's criminal element right in front of young Bruce to understand why he created the Batman alter ego. I needed more explanation of Angela's past in order to accept her current behavior as justifiable. I needed to connect to her emotions surrounding the abuse. To hear about how exactly her past ordeal affected her. Shown her fear at the idea of trusting someone enough to be vulnerable, etc..
I've read books before about women who'd survived abuse and how that made it hard for them to have a relationship. But those other books did things like show the heroine flinching at loud noises, or looking at ordinary items and imagining how they could be used as a weapon, or checking out windows as potential escape routes etc. Their emotional scars from the abuse were evident in everything they thought and did because their view of the world was fundamentally different. And when something spooked them, the way their heart raced and adrenaline spiked and so forth were all described so I could feel their terror right along with them.
That doesn't happen with Angela. She doesn't really behave like I'd expect someone who'd suffered physical abuse would behave. She never, for example, looked at Sam's incredibly powerful physique and thought about how much damage he could do to her if he turned violent. She never thought about how her ex-boyfriend had started out a smooth-talking charmer just like Sam but then turned ugly. We're being asked to believe that her abusive past is the lone reason for all her decisions in the story, and yet everywhere else she behaves as if it never happened. Basically she was a cardboard cutout of an abuse survivor. There's the superficial resemblance, but no depth. I couldn't care about her history of abuse because for 90% of the book I didn't really KNOW about it and I was never made to FEEL what Angela should have been feeling. And in the absence of that connection, all we're left with is a very slow-moving book about a woman who runs away from the fabulously handsome, understanding, patient, rich man who loves her....for reasons she can never explain.
I liked the beginning of the book best because even though Angela and Sam were fighting with each other, her actions actually made sense. Her reactions to his self-important swagger and dismissive snobbery about her cause were completely understandable. But when she and Sam stopped fighting, all that went away. The rest of the book is Sam bending over backwards to try to support Angela in every way and tell her how wonderful and fabulous she is, while not pushing her to take their relationship too far too fast, while Angela sends him mixed signals. Letting him get close, then telling him to get lost. Even in her inner monologue Angela frequently thinks about how this will be their last time together because that's just how it has to be. Or that she'll allow herself to have this moment with him to keep her warm at night as she soldiers on alone because it'll just never work out between them. She never gives actual reasons to him or us for why they can't be together and then later on frequently says that "her reasons for sending him away were right". What reasons?? You never explained what they were!!!! Seriously, the author should write speeches for politicians because she's perfected the art of saying a whole bunch of words that don't actually say anything at all.
I found the ending unsatisfying as well because it was just more of the same. Angela never really grew as a character and Sam just kept on being unbelievably understanding and patient with her. I'm trying to picture what their life together would be like if Angela always gets her way without ever having to explain her reasons and Sam just tiptoes around her, apologizing for things when he's never done anything wrong. It doesn't sound like an even partnership and that's just sad.
August 2, 2023
Angela is a fighter. All is childhood and young adult life turns out the worst, she flees her home and enrolled in college. Time passed and now she is a social worker, and her dream is to open a shelter house for abused women.
With the help of the Diamonds funds, she is working to open her shelter.
Sam Diamond, the only biological son of the Diamonds is an arrogant self-center man and there is nothing more important than his plans and the family ranch. When he meets Angela Beker as a representation of his mother, things go ugly.
She is tired of this kind of man, so she guards herself and fights for what she wants, her shelter home.
Find out what secrets Angela holds, and what makes her so strong and fearful at the same time. And what Sam discovered about himself and what is important to fight for.
It is a very emotionally touching story. With a realistic theme. Because we sometimes do not understand, why? This story gives you an inside look at how a victim or a recovering victim thinks and acts, just to protect her/himself.
Good reading.
With the help of the Diamonds funds, she is working to open her shelter.
Sam Diamond, the only biological son of the Diamonds is an arrogant self-center man and there is nothing more important than his plans and the family ranch. When he meets Angela Beker as a representation of his mother, things go ugly.
She is tired of this kind of man, so she guards herself and fights for what she wants, her shelter home.
Find out what secrets Angela holds, and what makes her so strong and fearful at the same time. And what Sam discovered about himself and what is important to fight for.
It is a very emotionally touching story. With a realistic theme. Because we sometimes do not understand, why? This story gives you an inside look at how a victim or a recovering victim thinks and acts, just to protect her/himself.
Good reading.
Read
January 15, 2025This book kept me reading and as someone who isn't super into reading that really helped me power through this book. I am 100% a romance novel girly when it comes to reading. Angela and Sam have a beautiful connection. The DV aspect of it really hits home in all the right ways, the fears that come with DV etc. Well portrayed and thought out. This is my first book by this author but I look forward to reading more by her.
April 14, 2024
Love this series! Read book 2 first after another Donna Alward book and got hooked. Cutest stories with great characters that you don’t normally expect from simple feel good romances. May not be for everyone but definitely for me.
January 20, 2025
Super quick read
Pretty easy to follow
I like the message the author is trying to convey I just hate a victim mindset mentality and it showed in Angela sometimes despite being the “overcomer”
Super easy quick read
Pretty easy to follow
I like the message the author is trying to convey I just hate a victim mindset mentality and it showed in Angela sometimes despite being the “overcomer”
Super easy quick read
July 16, 2023
Love a cowboy moment 🤠
October 1, 2023
DNF ch 5
July 5, 2013
The Last Real Cowboy was a sweet, gentle romance. (No sex scenes, btw.) Angela was easy to like and want a HEA for. She had seen some tough times and it was easy to see why she made decisions as she did most of the time. Sam was a nice guy and I enjoyed his character growth.
My reason for not giving this book more stars is the book just didn't excite me. It was like a pleasant stroll through a nice park - not at all a waste of time, but not an adventure you'll be telling everybody about with enthusiasm. I would be happy to read more by this author to see if she has more exciting work out there.
My reason for not giving this book more stars is the book just didn't excite me. It was like a pleasant stroll through a nice park - not at all a waste of time, but not an adventure you'll be telling everybody about with enthusiasm. I would be happy to read more by this author to see if she has more exciting work out there.
January 4, 2020
Having read book 3 I think it was in the series’s I got book one, to discover it was different characters in the book. I thought it would be a continuation...so red this fast but didn’t like it as my punch as book 3. Don’t know if I will continue the series, I skimmed though this to finish it. Wasn’t overly impressed with this story. The other book I read first was much better.
August 22, 2013
This was a fast easy read. I adored Sam but the dialogue was often stilted and came across as very artificial. Nothing that fabulous though I liked the concept behind Butterfly House.
August 28, 2013
Very sweet love story? This has very relevant story lines?
May 29, 2025
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews