Mustang Wild by Stacey Kayne

Skylar Daines has spent most of her life in a man's world. Her mother died when she was young and Sky and her younger brother Garrett were raised by their father, who trained horses and worked cattle drives. At her father's instruction Sky went as far as dressing as a boy in order to work on the stock drives. Now she has gotten too mature to pass as a boy and longs to settle down and have a real home. When her father is murdered he leaves nothing but the deed to a ranch in Wyoming and instructions to contact his partner, Chance Morgan, for help. Skyler knows that the ranch is the only chance she and Garrett have for a safe future, so they go in search of Chance. They find his twin brother Tucker instead.

Tucker is very drunk and he and Sky end up married. Sky is anxious to annul the marriage until Chance shows up and tells her that her father lied to her. He was never partners with the Morgans, he was only an employee, and the deed was simply collateral for their business deal. This is disastrous news and Sky refuses to believe it without seeing the contract her father signed, which is on the Morgan's ranch. She refuses to agree to the annulment until they reach Wyoming. The already difficult situation gets even more complicated when Sky and Tucker find themselves attracted to each other in spite of the fact that neither one trusts the other.


First point, the circumstances that lead to Skyler and Tucker getting married didn't make much sense to me. The whole scene struck me as totally unrealistic on several levels. I liked the rest of the book well enough that I just waved it off, but if I had liked it less I'd be writing a whole paragraph's worth of snarky comments about it.

Drunken marriage aside, I did like this one. I could sympathize with Skyler's situation. Her upbringing leaves her with little reason to trust men and few options for taking care of herself and her brother. Tucker's distrust of women, at least when it comes to marriage, also seemed believable to me. When the only marriage a man has seen up close was so bad it drove his father to go to war instead of remaining at home it's understandable that the guy would want to avoid matrimony.

I liked that there wasn't a simple answer to Sky and Tucker's problems and having sex didn't magically cure everything. Instead they had to work out their issues by compromising and adapting. That level of realism sort of made up for the drunken marriage.

Grade: B-