Lone Star Christmas: Cowboy Christmas Eve

As the title indicates, this one takes place in Texas and features an allegedly forbidden romance—reasons for which are pretty thin—between two childhood friends. Some other family drama stuff happens around a wedding and a father’s illness, but it’s obviously there more to provide tension and drama than actual interest. Author Delores Fossen adds plenty of good old folksiness—”sweet baby Moses in the basket!”—to this down-home tale of will they/won’t they. She also manages to make a sentence composed almost exclusively of clichés, the way a less gifted person might string together a sentence with conversation hearts: “Here was that rock and hard place again, the one where he had to walk on eggshells.” Though she does get questionable bonus points for choosing to repeatedly refer to an orgasm as a “flash fire.” Aside from that head-scratcher, the dirty-talk scenes aren’t too bad. They manage to describe sex in a way that’s generally erotic and that avoids calling genitalia by bizarre code names. There are only a handful of sex scenes, though, so if you’re reading for arousal, you’ll have to wade through a whole lot of the book’s Texas toast-of-a-plot to get it.