At Love’s Bidding + Giveaway

She sells priceless antiques. He sells livestock by the pound.

Is he really the man to make a bid for her heart?

After helping her grandfather at their Boston auction house, Miranda Wimplegate discovers she’s accidentally sold a powerful family’s prized portrait to an anonymous bidder. Desperate to appease the people who could ruin them forever, they track it to the Missouri Ozarks and makes an outlandish offer to buy the local auction house and all its holdings before the painting can move again.

Upon crossing the country, however, Miranda and her grandfather discover their new auction house doesn’t deal in fine antiques, but in livestock. And its frustratingly handsome manager, Wyatt Ballentine, is frustrated to discover his fussy new bosses don’t know a thing about the business he’s single-handedly kept afloat. Faced with more heads of cattle than they can count—but no mysterious painting—Miranda and Wyatt form an unlikely but charged partnership to try and prevent a bad situation from getting worse.

My Review:

published in 2015

Sweet swoony lighthearted bliss. Love all the exacting details in a Jennings novel right down to the clever title tie-ins and this one is brilliant. What starts out as a comedy of errors turns into a intriguing tale of subterfuge. An Ozark Mountain town full of quirky characters provides a lively backdrop to romance and mayhem as Miranda and Wyatt try to navigate their attraction to each other and the mystery dogging their heels. 

And while I’d categorize At Love’s Bidding as a romantic comedy there are still some deep and thought-provoking story threads that make the read all the richer. One of those has to do with Miranda’s grandfather. He is in the early stages of what we now know as Alzheimer’s and watching Miranda struggle to come to grips with the change in her beloved grandpa made my heart ache. Jennings does an incredibly good job of portraying the honest emotions of this kind of family turmoil.

A delightful mix of comedy and drama make for a satisfying reading escape.

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