I've got to state at the outset my belief that Maisey Yates doesn't have a bad book in her--and that belief was again confirmed by the fact that her latest novel for Harlequin Desire, One Night Rancher (The Carsons of Lone Rock #3), was a one-sitting, couldn't put it down, up until 5:00 a.m. read, and it gets 5 bleary-eyed stars from this reader.
One Night Rancher is Jace and Cara's friends-to-lovers story, and for someone who always looks for character development in a novel, Ms. Yates did that in spades. These two characters have been best friends since middle-school, when Jace, youngest son of a welathy ranch family, came upon poor, bedraggled, bullied, motherless, fatherless, friendless and sad, Cara, trying to rescue the one new item her financially strapped grandfather could manage to buy for her, a new binder that the bullies destroyed. It was the start of a beautiful and lifelong friendship, even though Jace's rodeo career took him away for months at a time, the friendship survived his absences.
Jace had lost his little sister, Sofia, at a very early age to cancer, and he took her death hard--it caused him to also lose his faith in love and the hereafter, and left him wanting no commitments to anything or anyone outside of his friendship with Cara, and his love for his family--living only in the present. He's been treating Cara as Sofia's substitute for decades, but as the years have gone by, by, Cara fell totally and irrevocably in love with the handsome, caring, protective cowboy, while Jace remained utterly clueless about her feelings, and his own, but he's about to have a rude awakening, when Cara, who's been running her grandfather's bar solo since his death, decides to purchase the supposedly haunted Lone Rock Hotel, which has a caveat--she must spend one night there. Jace decides it's too dangerous for her to be alone and offers to keep her company, and their friendship is definitely about to change.
To tell you more would ruin it for you, so I'll just say that this novel had me in tears more than once, and that these two characters felt as if they could just walk right off the page--their emotional struggles and growth seemed that real, and their self-realizations seemed that honest. I loved that Cara was a strong woman, one who was able to stand on her own two feet and was willing to walk away rather than accept the crumbs of the life Jace eventually offered her. All in all, it was a great read, and I highly recommend it.
I voluntarily read an advance reader copy of this novel. The opinions stated are my own.