I spent a week reading the tale of Tessa, the thirty-something travel agent, who was perfectly fine never searching for her adoptive mother until a handsome cowboy lawyer walks into her travel agency one day and announces that her bio mother is looking for her.

If that sounds like a romance novel, yes, it is. Wedding Pearls by Carolyn Brown features lovely Tessa, the cowboy lawyer with a dimple in his chin, I believe, and not only Tessa’s mother, but a whole troop of long-lost relatives and close friends who intend to get acquainted with Tessa by taking a month-long trip all over Texas.

Isn’t it good advice to start new relationships small? Say, a lunch date?

Well, it’s not my place to suggest how Tessa, or Lola, her mother, go about things.

Then again, the point of a romance novel is to cook up circumstances that plausibly throw together two people who you just know are going to fall in love.

Did I mention that the cowboy lawyer will be driving the Cadillac that hauls these tourists from town to town?

Anyway, I found myself falling for the plot, going along with these people’s utter abandon, flipping the pages, my blood pumping as the characters indulged themselves in . . .

. . . Dinners with hot rolls and chocolate pie. Nights of barbecue and take-out Chinese.

Don’t forget plenty of wine and whatever one of those ladies has in her flask. Also, casino night, shopping trips, buying outfits that show off their new tats. Then stopping for fried chicken . . . snow cones . . . Indian tacos.

Miss Brown never says these gals can’t fit into their jeans anymore. So I would really like to find the Platform 9 3/4 that takes me to a certain Cadillac roaming through Texas.

Will love win out? Will obstacles arise? Will Tessa need a fork for the pecan pie waiting for her at the cowboy’s ranch?

My lips are sealed.

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