The Mail Order Groom
A Novel
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Sandra Chastain returns to the richly sensuous Wild West as a case of mistaken identity leads to uninhibited passion and pleasure.
Melissa Grayson desires nothing more than to teach art and poetry to the children at the private school founded by her father. But every trip Melissa makes into town drives the single men into such a frenzy that the local clergy and sheriff finally give her an ultimatum: marriage or jail. Prepared to make any sacrifice for her students, Melissa writes her New York pen pal—a sickly, sensitive scholar—to arrange a platonic union whose real commitment will be to education.
Gambling man Lucky Lawrence is always up for a game of chance. But when a sore loser expects Lucky to pay with his life, even he wouldn’t bet on making it out alive—until he’s confused for a studious Harvard boy who’s engaged to the most beautiful woman Lucky has ever seen. Never one to deny a damsel in distress, Lucky happily plays the part. Melissa in turn is shocked to discover that her groom is so ruggedly handsome—with broad shoulders and teasing eyes . . . a man who just may show her a love she has always thought existed only in books.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cursed with irresistible beauty irresistible, at least, to the female-starved, gold-mining men of the 19th-century town of Silver Wind, Colo. schoolteacher Melissa Grayson is forced by outraged citizens to choose between being jailed, run out of town or married. So she sends for a mail-order husband, a frail intellectual with whom she's corresponded but never met. Within minutes of his arrival, she marries him. Problem solved. Except that Melissa's new spouse is not pen-pal James Harold Pickney IV but roving gambler and rescuer-of-damsels-in-distress Lucky Lawrence, who's fleeing from a Mexican evildoer named Cerqueda. A cowboy comedy of errors ensues as Lucky shakes up the town and Melissa's life. Chastain's (The Outlaw Bride) straightforward writing style drifts from simple to simplistic more than once. There are interminable rehashings of the plot every time a new character shows up, for instance, and Cerqueda is virtually a south-of-the-border cartoon. Still, the exuberance of Chastain's writing matches the wild west setting perfectly; it's easy to imagine this book adapted as an "Oklahoma!"-type musical comedy albeit with considerably more premarital sex than is usually found on Broadway (or in the average romance novel).
