Romance: Where the Horses Run, Kaki Warner

Where the Horses Run
Kaki Warner
ISBN: 9780425263273
Series: Heartbreak Creek, #2 (first book in series: Behind His Blue Eyes)
Romance: An ex-Ranger turned horse-whisperer rancher goes to England to find a horse and a lady needing rescue.
Read January 7, 2015.

Picked this up on the strength of the back cover copy and the associated Goodreads reviews (I love negative reviews, they often are much more revealing than the positive ones) in this case, a set of negative reviews griping about the lack of intimate scenes and the slow pace of the story and the focus on elements of the book besides the growing relationship between the two main protagonists.  Really?  Sounds perfect!

Rafe Jessup quit the Rangers after a bloody shootout (one minor complaint from me is that the circumstances of that event remain cloudy) and moved on to his real joy - working with horses.  He's a sort of horse-whisperer with a reputation for helping animals others would have put down or broken.  Based on that, he's hired by an ex-pat Scot from Heartbreak Creek to run his newly established stables, and their first big job is to head over to jolly old England to pick up horses from distressed nobles short on cash-flow.

Josephine Cathcart is the daughter of one such distressed noble - well, actually, they aren't noble, and that's the problem.  Her father worked his way up from a position in the mines to become that disgusting creature known as "new money" and as such, he and Josephine are barely tolerated in polite society, despite the grand house and scrupulously-correct manners and his continued bribes and gifts to fellow noblemen.  Josephine learned her status the hard way as a young girl, smitten by a neighboring young lord, who pledged love, but married a Countess.  Now, with a young bastard son, and her prize stallion ruined by a grueling steeplechase, she is being farmed out for marriage or companionship by her desperate and broke father.

I loved that the story came first (as ridiculous a premise as it is) and I loved the "fish out of water" impact of a Texan in British polite society (he keeps getting himself kicked out of the house) and I loved that the villains were actually three-dimensional people (eventually) and the conundrum was presented as an actual difficult proposition to consider and manage the repercussions, rather than the obvious "marry the Texan and run off" that I worried it would become.

I don't think I'll be reading the first in the series.  The blurb didn't appeal to me, but if there is a subsequent book about our interesting Scots lord and his feisty English wife, I think I might pick that one up.  I am interested in the next book about one of the minor characters, an American-Cherokee warrior and his Quaker, African-American freed-slave lover.  Talk about getting into an interesting political debate there!