Two To Wrangle (Hotel Rodeo, #2) by Victoria Vane Formats available: ebook
Series: Hotel Rodeo #2
Pages: 144
Published by Lyrical Shine on February 16th 2016
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
Goodreads
A COUNTRY BOY
Maybe having a hot and heavy affair with the boss’s daughter wasn’t the smartest move. But country boy Ty Morgan didn’t regret a moment with city girl Monica Brandt…until she left Las Vegas to return to her life in New York. When devastating news sends her running back, Ty can’t help but open his arms. His heart, however, is another matter. AND A CITY GIRL
Now that Ty has what he’s always wanted—controlling interest in Hotel Rodeo—Monica is certain their time together is at an end. Then Ty asks her to come on board as a partner. Maybe it’s just her money he needs, but the chance to stick close to the sexy wrangler sure could make work a whole lot more interesting. GET READY TO TANGO
Their partnership doesn’t come without a heap of problems. The two can’t agree on anything—except their iron-hot attraction. As the hotel’s Grand Opening approaches, the truth is all too clear: Ty and Monica must find a way to mix business with pleasure if they have any shot at dancing off into the sunset together… Praise for Victoria Vane“Erotic and sexy.” —Library Journal on the Devil DeVere series
“For erotic passion and one-liners, the first book in Vane's new series will satisfy...Vane's latest gets a big yee-haw.”—RT Book Reviews on Slow Hand
My Review:
The story may be set mostly in Las Vegas, but the relationship between Ty and Monica feels more like a Texas Two-Step, but I’m not sure whether that’s two steps forward and two steps back, or possibly two steps together and two steps apart.
I’m not sure that Ty and Monica figure it out either, at least not until the very, very end.
Two to Wrangle is the second half of a fun “opposites attract” type of romance. The first half of the story is in Hell on Heels (reviewed here). Sometimes it isn’t 100% necessary to read the first book in a series before picking up the second (or subsequent) but Two to Wrangle is not one of those times. Hell on Heels and Two to Wrangle are two parts of the same story, and neither feels complete without the other.
In Hell on Heels, Monica comes to Vegas to take care of her father Tom’s business after he suffers a debilitating stroke – and runs smack into Ty, who manages the slightly broken-down hotel her dad owns at the very edge of the Las Vegas strip.
They are on opposite sides from the very beginning, in ways that are both obvious and not so obvious. While Monica is Tom’s biological daughter, they didn’t meet until her adulthood – her mother only contacted Tom to inform him he had a child after he struck it rich. Mom wanted back child support, and got it, while Tom just wanted to know his daughter and Monica just wanted a father.
On that other hand, while Tom and Ty have no biological relationship, Tom pretty much raised Ty and Ty loves him like a father. From Tom’s perspective, it’s clear that Ty is the child he never knew he had, and the advent of Monica into Tom’s life doesn’t change his relationship with Ty.
But the hotel that Ty manages for Tom, the Hotel Rodeo, is long past its glory days. It’s still a decent place to stay, but Ty is doing the best he can with not enough resources to compete in Las Vegas’ glitzy, upscale market.
Monica is a business analyst, and a damn good one. She wants to sell the hotel, she sees the land it’s on as worth more than the business. Ty had just convinced Tom to renovate when the stroke hit him.
As Monica and Ty bite, scratch and claw their way through too many arguments and one glorious night, they push each other away as much as they can’t stay away from each other. Monica wants to go back to New York, and she’s afraid to give her heart to a man who admits he can’t commit. Ty has his head up his ass and can admit that Monica is the one woman he might commit to.
Just as they pull apart, Tom succumbs to a second stroke, and all the battles have to be fought all over again. But this time, for keeps.
Escape Rating B: Ty and Monica really are opposites. It’s not just the country boy/city girl opposite, or the East Coast vs. open West opposite, it’s pretty much everything. But one of those opposites is that Ty is the people person and the visionary, where Monica is a pragmatic businesswoman who always looks at the bottom line. Ty recognizes that to make his vision of the Hotel Rodeo succeed, he needs Monica’s business sense as well as her consent.
It takes most of the book for him to admit to himself, let alone to Monica, that he also just needs her.
Monica, pure and simple, is afraid to upend her life and give her heart to someone who has always said that he doesn’t do relationships, and seems to have a history of not sticking to the ones he does try. There’s also an element where Monica is used to dealing with men as alpha sharks, and until she sees a piece of that in Ty, a place where he is the king and everyone sees him as such, she has a bit of a hard time getting past some of her own assumptions.
That he nearly gets himself killed does finally move things along. A lot.
One of the hard things in this story as a whole is that Monica and Ty are people who are wired not to lean on anyone. Not to rely on anyone. Ever. So they both put up a lot of roadblocks to a real relationship, not just by pushing the other away, but also inside their own heads. At times, it seems as if Monica is looking for reasons not to trust Ty, and Ty is looking for reasons to fight with Monica.
It takes a major crisis for them to each pull their heads out of their own asses and admit what they feel, instead of talking around and around about what they think the other one feels. When they finally do, they are able to reach for something that has always eluded them, a real shot at happy ever after.
The next book in the Hotel Rodeo series is Beauty and the Bull Rider. While it features characters we have met in the first two stories, it does not follow Ty and Monica but looks at a different and potentially explosive, relationship among their circle of friends. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next!
Looks like an all right read. I don’t think I’d enjoy it with the book not always moving along well, but it sounds all right.
All Right is probably a good description. The hero and heroine both drove me a bit bonkers at times. But once I’d read the first book, I felt like I just had to know how they figured things out. And both books are blissfully short!