Road to a Cowboy
Author and Publisher: Amy Aislin
Cover Artist: Morningstar Ashley Designs
Release Date: August 6, 2024 (audio coming early September)
Genre: Contemporary M/M romance
Tropes: Childhood friends to lovers, small town, cowboys
Themes: Family, friendship
Series: Windsor, Wyoming 2
Heat Rating: 3 flames
Length: 57 000 words
It’s book two in the Windsor, Wyoming trilogy,
but can be read as a standalone and does not end on a cliffhanger.
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Blurb
Detour
Five years after the death of his spouse, Austin MacIsaac is ready to find love again—and he's got the perfect guy in his sexy cowboy of a best friend, Cal Anderson. If only he can convince Cal to detour out of the friend zone.
Road work ahead
Cal has been in love with Austin for longer than he can remember. The man has been his rock through the ups and downs of messy family drama. But shaking up their friendship for something more could lead them down a bumpy and unsafe road.
Merge
Amid a backdrop of the Wyoming mountains and under a summer sky, can Austin and Cal merge their lives into one and let the road to romance lead to happily ever after?
Excerpt
Austin’s heart did a sideways flip when Cal stopped next to him, his broad shoulders as intimidating as the Rockies to anyone who didn’t know him.
“Welcome back,” Cal said in a slow drawl that dragged along Austin’s senses. “How was Montana?”
“Beats me,” Austin said with a grin, keeping his eyes on the image on his camera’s display. “But Kootenai National Forest was gorgeous. You should see some of the shots I got. The night sky there is spectacular.”
“Doesn’t it look the same as everywhere else?”
Austin gave him the stink eye. “Don’t sass me, Calvin.”
Cal didn’t smile—his smiles were as rare as a sighting of Halley’s Comet—but his lips twitched.
“And no, it doesn’t look the same everywhere.”
“If you say so.” Cal looked off to the right. “What’s with the second camera?”
Austin jerked his gaze to where he’d set up an additional tripod several feet away. “That one’s recording so I can make a time-lapse video.”
Cal grunted.
His presence was nonintrusive as the sun sank and the stars began to emerge, yet Austin was always aware of him. He was as aware of Cal as he was of the location of the moon or the image in his camera’s viewfinder.
A few minutes later, shadows bathing the landscape, Austin began packing up his equipment under a sky quickly turning to dusk. The mountains had turned nearly invisible—when it got dark out here, it got dark—and Cal was almost a silhouette against the sky. Something about him standing silently with his hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans, gazing out into the distance, screamed of both contentment and loneliness, making Austin’s heart clench.
The first memory Austin had of Cal at Windsor Ranch was of him falling into a puddle near the corral on a rainy summer day when they’d been seven or eight. Now, as the foreman of that same ranch, Cal was basically running the place. The juxtaposition between kid-Cal, covered in rain and mud as he’d blinked up at Austin with big gray eyes as though wondering how he’d fallen into the puddle, and adult-Cal, tall, strong, coolly confident, and carrying the weight of the entire ranch on his shoulders, was sometimes jarring in that strange twist-of-fate kind of way.
Austin brought the camera up to his eyes, adjusted the settings, and snapped a photo, framing Cal in the right third of the shot while he gazed off to the left, making the viewer wonder what he was looking at. Austin would call it Cowboy Against the Night. He might even put it up for sale in his gallery instead of keeping it for himself.
Maybe.
Cal must’ve heard the shutter, because he turned with a raised eyebrow.
“Smile,” Austin said, aiming his camera at him again.
Cal did the exact opposite, making Austin laugh as he took the picture anyway.
Carra's Review
I don’t read too many cowboy/western-type romances, but I have to say that this was a great one that I picked up this time around. I’ve really enjoyed this author’s other stories (in particular the hockey romances), so I’m glad to find their storytelling talent continues to extend to other tropes. Here in Road to a Cowboy, we get a wonderful slow-burn best friends to lovers tale that is relatively low angst and is primarily character driven.
Austin and Cal fit together perfectly—once they can get past a bit of a rocky start. They are one of those couples where you use a familiar pairing to describe them…like “they go together like peanut butter and jelly”.
Cal had a less than ideal upbringing with a mother who was cold and detached, which continues to this day and is really the primary source of angst in the story. Austin’s family life was quite the opposite, and something Cal was lucky to share with him in his later teen years.
This story moves at a mostly sedate pace, but I didn’t feel like it was too slow at all. I was glad of the lower angst level, as it allowed the book to concentrate more on the characters and their feelings, and how they dealt with them.
Overall, this was a solid 4-star read for me, and is a story I’d recommend to any M/M romance fan. It is written well and has truly likable characters (well, minus Cal’s mother), and I loved Cal and Austin together. While it is the second book in the series, it can definitely be read as a standalone. It is meant for readers 18+ for adult language and sexual content.
About the Author
Amy’s lived with her head in the clouds since she first picked up a book as a child, and being fluent in two languages means she’s read a lot of books! She first picked up a pen on a rainy day in fourth grade when her class had to stay inside for recess. Tales of treasure hunts with her classmates eventually morphed into love stories between men, and she’s been writing ever since. She writes evenings and weekends—or whenever she isn’t at her full-time day job saving the planet at Canada’s largest environmental non-profit.
An unapologetic introvert, Amy reads too much and socializes too little, with no regrets. She loves connecting with readers. Join her Facebook Group to stay up-to-date on upcoming releases and for access to early teasers, find her on Instagram, or sign up for her infrequent newsletter.
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