Promises Decide (Promise, #2)

by Sarah McCarty

[EBookObsessed]

It was a surprise to find this historical western series. It has been awhile since I read an old western. This was a great choice.

I like my cowboys old school, not Tweeting on the back of a horse, so I was very interested in an offered copy of Sarah McCarty's upcoming release. This is the fifth book in the series, but a simple reading of the premise of the other four books left me ready for all the other characters that I met.

In Promises Decide, Jackson Montgomery is a bounty hunter on his way home after turning over his most recent bounty. As he passes the Bentley place, he sees smoke rising from the chimney. The old Bentley place is a disaster of a house with crooked floors, land too rocky to grow anything, a dry well and it was built in the middle of a flash flood plain. There is no way Bentley is living there anymore so he must have found some greenhorn to sell it to.

Since he is curious by nature, and everyone likes interesting news to share in town, Jackson decides to swing by and meet the suckers who purchased the house. What he finds is a couple of kids surrounding the (probably) dry well. It looks like their Ma fell in, which is bad enough, by a dry well also attracts rattlesnakes. Jackson is not only curious, but he is chivelrous and there is no way he will leave this greenhorn woman and her kids to their fate.

But Jackson is hurt going down that well to rescue the pretty young woman, a woman too young to have mothered the three kids standing outside the well, all of whom look nothing alike. Jackson ends up staying with them awhile to recover.  He knows they need some protection, even if it just from their own foolishness, and he also stays because that curious nature of his is demanding he find out just what is going on.

Jackson isn't a fool and he can tell that Mimi and the children are city people and are on the run from something or someone. Jackson can't help falling for Mimi and her three young charges, and even though they haven't yet come to trust him, he will protect them all with his life.

While the love seems to come a bit quickly, Jackson was thinking as he was riding home that it is about time he starts thinking about settling down and returning to the family ranch permanently. It might have something to do with the fact that four of his friends have found love and are settled down. Then he meets Mimi and likes what he sees. Not only is she pretty, but she has spirit and just needs someone to teach her and the children about survival in the old west.

In a world where it takes three hours to ride into the closest town, talk about a rough commute, I lost a little respect for Mimi that in the year she has been on the run with the children she didn't even pick up a book on farming or quiz people they met as they traveled out west or offer to work on a homestead to learn. She was trying to avoid being caught by staying away from towns, but spent all of their money buying a property that would have killed them and even if it didn't, they had no understanding of farming or hunting or anything else to survive in the wilderness. She didn't run away a week ago. They have been running for a year. What was she doing all that time?

This was a quick read and I was suprised to find out it was 320 pages.  This wasn't a convaluted story.  Just a simply romance set in a simpler time.

I liked the family of characters that we met from the prior stories and really want to take some time to read them. Unfortunately, there are no audiobooks for this series which I like to use for playing catch up.   I do want to know more about Jenna and Cougar and the Rev. and I am simplying going to have to find some time to squeeze them in.

Received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

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