Only one month before Christmas, and Sydney Steele had only four weeks left to put together the Wildcat Bluff Fire Rescue calendar, and she still had no Mr. December. It was not the day for her precious Celeste -- her 1959 Cadillac --to sputter to a halt. Thankfully, Dune Barrett was passing by, and the car had only a minor issue, but Sydney was nearly overheating. She and the sexy cowboy had been flirting ever since he came to town. Sydney has been a widow for two years, she will always love her late husband, but for the sake of her eight-year-old daughter Storm, and for her own, she's beginning to question if it's time to move on or if the sexy cowboy is only a passing fancy.

City girl that I am, I always crave a good cowboy Christmas romance and this year, A VERY COWBOY CHRISTMAS will be hard to beat. I have been somewhat disenchanted with so-called sexy contemporary romances recently, but I will admit that the cover caught my eye. Too many seem like a bunch of sex scenes, dirty talk with a flimsy story to hold everything together, so I figured that if I got bored at some point, I could always ogle the yummy cover. It turns out that I barely glanced at the cover while devouring this book. Needless to say, it was my first Kim Redford book.

Sydney is a strong, confident woman if a bit lonely; she works hard to give her daughter a good home, but she soon comes to realize that Dune is a really nice guy, who happens to be an Adonis, and he takes it all in stride. Dune is upfront, flirtatious in an honorable manner, but it doesn't take long before he reconsiders that Sydney makes him happy. Sydney and Dune's flirtatious banter is really terrific, and I love how it progressively led to more. They both acknowledged their pasts, they didn't rush into anything, because they simply didn't know if there was more to their obvious attraction.

Ms. Redford's descriptions of the Texas town are so vibrant, and the characters so genuinely endearing, that I embraced it all in a heartbeat. A VERY COWBOY CHRISTMAS is a romance between good, down-home people, and I loved Sydney and Dune equally; I also found Storm a lovely child. There's a retro-modern vibe throughout A VERY COWBOY CHRISTMAS that I found fresh and fun: Sydney has taken to dressing in vintage 1950s clothes to match her beloved Celeste, which she inherited from an elderly friend; and the town itself -- from the drive-in through every shop and the people -- had this earthy quality that makes a good cowboy book great.

I wonder if Slade, Sydney's brother, will be next to find his happy ever after? I hope so, because he intrigued me, in any case, I will be there for the next Smoking Hot Cowboys installment, because Kim Redford was a new author to me, with A VERY COWBOY CHRISTMAS, and she has gained a new fan!

Book Summary

Sydney Steele needs to wrangle cowboy firefighters to model for her charity Christmas calendar, and Dune Barrett—who she has in mind for Mr. December—is just the man for the job.