Karen Rose Smith, To Protect and Cherish

To Protect and Cherish

Karen Rose Smith

Silhouette, Apr 2006

ISBN: 0373198108

When his housekeeper retired at sixty-five, Tate Pardell, owner of Pardell Construction, advertises for a replacement to work and live on his nearby Texas ranch. Applicant waitress Anita Sutton is pretty, intelligent and a self starter, but also the mother of three small kids. During the interview Tate insists on meeting her five year old twin boys Corey and Jared, and her ten and a half month old daughter Marie. He admires her spunk, as their father Larry died in an accident one year ago, but Anita struggles to pay off the credit card debt he spent on his girlfriends.

After meeting the kids and tasting her cooking, Tate hires Anita. On the day she is moving, Larry's parents arrive to Anita's shock, as she thought they were dead. They suffer from guilt as they let Larry run away when he was sixteen and never followed up until recently. Not long afterward, her wealthy in-laws sue for custody of children. Tate offers Anita a marriage of convenience to bolster her argument. She accepts. However, as the adults fall in love, both want more out of their marriage, but neither will take that first step that could break their fragile relationship.

At the same time readers will believe that Tate is too perfect to be real, the audience will want their significant other to be just like him. Anita is an interesting character, as she has goals to open up a graphic design business and insure her children attend college. The support cast augments a fine tale, as the three kids, Anita's former sixty year old neighbor and the in-laws provide depth to a fine modern day marriage of convenience romance.