Wyoming Special Delivery

WYOMING SPECIAL DELIVERY (Dawson Family Ranch Book #2) by Melissa Senate is a contemporary romance and the newest addition to the Dawson Family Ranch series. This story can easily be read as a standalone, but it was so engaging that now I want to read about all the Dawson siblings.

Daisy Dawson is abandoned at the alter and decides to leave on her own to her honeymoon hotel, but on the way her car breaks down and her baby decides it is time to be born. Stuck on the side of the road and in labor, the mystery man from Cabin 1 comes along just in time to help deliver Daisy’s baby. She cannot thank him enough, until she returns home and finds out why he is on the ranch.

Harrison McCord has come to settle a ten-year-old score for his deceased father and terminally ill aunt. He is the rightful owner of the Dawson Family Ranch. When Daisy returns, Harrison gets the family together and tells them his reason for being on the ranch. The family is ready and willing to fight him in court, but Daisy has another plan.

Can Daisy show Harrison what the ranch has meant to the Dawson family for generations and help him change his mind about his father’s last request? Will Harrison be able to keep this as strictly business and not let his growing feelings for Daisy and her baby interfere with his decisions?

This is a cozy romance with no sex scenes, but a lot of love. The romance happens quickly with a lot of emotional ups and downs. I enjoy how Ms. Senate gave both Harrison and Daisy valid points of views and sides in the feud that had to be worked out for the HEA. This was an enjoyable read, but for me this plot would have been more realistic over a longer timeline.

I will be anxiously waiting for Daisy’s brothers’ stories and hoping they find all the love that Daisy wishes for them too.

Things have gone from bad to worse for Daisy Dawson since we last met her in For The Twins Sake. Melissa Senate isn’t making anything easy on her! Ready to marry her almost born baby’s daddy, she finds herself missing a groom. Angry, scared and sad, she storms away from the ranch,, only to find herself alone and in labor with no phone or way to get help.

Harrison McCord was at the Dawson Family Ranch on pretenses. He was there to take his inheritance, Daisy’s family ranch. What he wasn’t planning on was delivering Daisy’s baby on the side of the road or falling for the beautifully broken, but incredibly strong, woman.

Harrison is now faced with a dilemma; pull another rug out from under Daisy and her newborn or walk away and leave the Dawson’s alone. Driven by his father’s last wishes, he comes clean to Daisy and her brother about why he’s there.

Daisy doesn’t take it well! she’s determined to show Harrison that when her father bet the ranch, it wasn’t what it is today. Long walks on the ranch, dinner dates, and time spent with Harrison’s dying aunt, slowly helps Harrison see the bigger picture.

While Daisy tries to save the ranch, she’s also falling for Harrison, even though she wants to hate him. Daisy has a way to sense when someone is hurting and Harrison is hurting. He lost his father recently and when his aunt passes, he will be alone in this world.

Harrison and Daisy’s love story is slow, gentle, and fraught with so many issues that you’re sure they’ll never find their way together. Daisy is a new mom raising another man’s baby, and Harrison is adrift from everything he knows. One thing he knows for sure. he loves Baby Tony and he loves Daisy Dawson. He decides if she still has the capacity to love someone that hard after everything she’s been through, then he can, too.

Wyoming Special Delivery is a wonderful second chance-ish type story for Daisy and draws you deeper into the lives of all of the Dawson’s. I can’t wait to read the stories of Daisy’s brothers to see if Daisy’s dream of having them all on the ranch comes true! I give Wyoming Special Delivery five stars!

A complimentary copy was received by Harlequin for an honest review. All opinions herein are my own.

‘Wyoming Special Delivery‘ is the second title in the ‘Dawson Family Ranch‘ series and brings Daisy’s situation into the spotlight. On what should have been her wedding day, a very pregnant Daisy is left at the altar by her baby’s daddy, a man who had already walked away once and now is walking, no, make that running away for good deciding that he doesn’t love her and wishes her and her baby good luck. “Her” baby. Jerk. Truth is that Daisy was already having second and third thoughts but for the baby’s sake would try to make a marriage with a man she no longer loved work. Well, he took that wind from her sails real fast. In anger, Daisy will send a text to her brother explaining what happened, and not wanting to face her family or friends takes off in her crappy car just to get away and wrap her head around this… but first she tosses her cell phone and engagement ring out the window. The ring, no loss, but that phone would have come in handy when she goes into labor far enough away from home that it’s unlikely anyone will see her car.

Unlikely, unless there is a ranch guest who is traveling that dirt road on his way into town to visit his dying aunt. A man with an agenda that hasn’t come to the surface just yet but soon will. You would think that delivering a baby along the side of the road would be some kind of bond between strangers, and perhaps it was, but Harrison isn’t about to let that stop him from his goal. Daisy’s father lost the ranch to his father a decade ago in a drunken bet. Now Harrison is here to claim that ownership, fulfilling his father’s dying wish. Talk about awkward.

Let me be very clear, I enjoyed the heck out of Daisy’s and Harrison’s romance. It’s got just enough tension, emotional draw, an adorable newborn, and a tight-knit family to make me one happy reader. But, frankly, I have issues with Daisy’s immediate post-pregnancy life. The only thing that saved this story, for me, was the fact that I understand an author builds their own world – it doesn’t have to be logical, or make sense to me, it only has to serve the purpose of that author. I get that.

As a mother myself, I have to sit back in admiration at Daisy’s energy, her ability to take long walks, be away from the newborn Tony for hours on end without having to find a discreet place to pump (ladies, you know what I’m saying), and only occasionally taking a nap when the baby does – usually she’s planning on how to get Harrison to like the Dawson’s enough to not steal their ranch away. Frankly, I was exhausted for the first full month (at least), and taking an energetic walk around a ranch would have been beyond my wildest fantasies, let alone some of the other activities.

Yet, the truth is that none of that reality is really sexy or romance inducing. And I get that, too. So, overlooking an unrealistic post-pregnancy lifestyle, I enjoyed ‘Wyoming Special Delivery‘ very much. In many ways, Harrison and the Dawsons (particularly Daisy) were both right about the ranch. It was nothing like the broken down, useless property that was bet ten years ago for Noah and his siblings have rebuilt the ranch into the new guest ranch that it is today. This ranch wasn’t the one that was bet so long ago. Draw in two fathers and their final wishes, a growing love that neither party can acknowledge because of that bet, and one woman who will stand on her principles about the ownership of that ranch… no matter what or who it costs her, give Daisy and Harrison’s fate a really good workout. I loved seeing Sara and Noah, the twins, several of Daisy’s brothers again, and perhaps a hint of the next story to come. It’s a good story, one that I’m betting you’d enjoy.

I own a Kindle edition of this story.

I’ve read a few of Melissa Senate’s books in the past (mainly chick lit titles) and enjoyed them, so to say that I was disappointed with “Wyoming Special Delivery” might be something of an understatement. I apologize in advance if this write-up comes off as more of a rant than a review, but I had a lot of thoughts as I was reading, and not many of them were positive.

The story did not start off well when it became clear that the female lead character, Daisy Dawson, was very impulsive and seemingly not very bright. At almost 9 months pregnant, she throws a tantrum after getting left at the altar (by a man she didn’t even love or particularly want to marry!) and decides that her best choice is to run away from her family’s ranch in rural Wyoming, driving a crappy old Honda and without her cell phone because she has just thrown it out the window in a fit of temper. This is obviously a recipe for disaster, so predictably, her car not only breaks down, but she goes into labor too. Luckily for Daisy, despite the fact that she’s stranded on a rural service road, a handsome stranger just happens to come along almost immediately, and he actually stops to help her. In another near miracle, she delivers the baby on the side of the road after only 5 or so contractions (lucky her!). (Really? The author couldn’t even have thrown in one line about how Daisy’s back had been killing her all day or something to make this even a little bit more believable?) My favorite part was that Daisy never made even a token protest about a strange man diving under her skirt without asking permission and cutting off her underwear. Nor is she even a little bit embarrassed about him having seen her lady parts when she sees him at the hospital later. Yes, she was giving birth at the time and it was an emergency, but still.

A day or so later, Daisy comes home with her newborn, Tony, and basically proceeds with her pre-baby life exactly as it was before, only with an infant strapped to her chest. Sorry, but life with a newborn is not that easy, especially as a single mother, no matter how much family support you may have. It’s exhausting, and she should have been sore from the birth, but yet somehow she manages to take multiple long walks around the ranch AND host dinner parties AND help her BFF with the guests’ breakfast service so she can whine about her feelings for the hottie who wants to take the ranch away from her family. WOMAN, WHY ARE YOU NOT AT HOME SITTING ON AN ICE PACK AND NAPPING WHEN THE BABY NAPS?? Oh, and supposedly she’s breastfeeding, but she’s still able to leave the baby for hours at a time at only 3 or 4 days postpartum. Really? A lot of newborns want to eat almost constantly, both because they’re still figuring out how to do it and because they have very small tummies. When exactly did Daisy have the time to pump and freeze a stash of breast milk (though I guess she could be substituting formula) and train the baby to take a bottle?

In addition to being a new mom, Daisy is also dealing with the fact that Harrison McCord wants to take possession of her family’s ranch because of a bet her father supposedly lost to his father 10 years ago. Since Harrison is a guest of the ranch for the next 5 days, Daisy decides that she is going to use that time to convince him to like her and her family so that he will decide to let them keep the ranch. Unfortunately for her, this plan ends up backfiring somewhere along the way, and she falls in love with him. Really? Talk about insta-love, and with the man trying to take away your home, no less. Let’s not forget that Daisy was just left at the altar a few days ago, too! Oh, and Daisy must have superhuman healing powers, because at 3 days postpartum she’s able to straddle Harrison’s lap so they can make out. (Meanwhile I’m having sympathy pains just thinking about it.)

As for Harrison and his half-baked scheme to take the ranch from Daisy’s family, I have major doubts about whether his claim would hold up in court. Harrison’s father saw the ranch 10 years ago and refused to collect on the bet at that time. What makes Harrison think that a signed napkin would constitute a valid agreement now? Harrison’s father’s previous refusal to collect on the bet could very well make such an agreement null and void. Beyond that, it makes zero sense for Harrison to go down this path. Who is he really punishing? Both his father and Daisy’s are gone, and his aunt is on her deathbed. It seems like he should just let bygones be bygones.

Overall, if the main part of this story had taken place even a month or 6 weeks later than it did to give Daisy a chance to recover from Tony’s birth, I might have been able to get past some (but not all) of these issues. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t seem like a lot of the story’s details were very well thought out. As a result, I can’t recommend it.

*ARC provided by the publisher via NetGalley. All opinions expressed are my own.