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 make 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 annoyed 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.
Jennings throws twist after twist into At Love’s Bidding. While the ending isn’t a complete surprise, I didn’t have it all figured out, either, and I love when an author surprises me.
The author’s country background shines through brightly. She sets an excellent scene, my very favorite part being the sale barn. Having grown up just a few miles from a sale barn that actually made history books with a weekly auction just like the one that she describes, I loved reading about the diversity of goods and the importance of the auction to the community.
That’s not the kind of auction house that Miranda expected to find when she pulled into Missouri, however, and that’s only one way that Jennings injects humor into the story. She does so a bit impishly, but the wide cast of characters – and Grandfather Wimplegate’s odd actions – keep the mood from ever becoming too dark.
Wyatt is a great main character. He’s flawed, handsome, and a hidden prince, and who wouldn’t like that? His ‘princely’ status, while a bit fantastic, does make for an exciting story, and I enjoyed reading about his spiritual and emotional journey.
Miranda doesn’t make him journey alone. Although taught to look out for others, her snobbishness causes her to miss out on many great people around her, and that leads her on her own quest for maturity. Often, Miranda’s contentment to drift and let others make the decisions for her would weaken her standing in my eyes, but she stood up for others in some pretty astounding ways in this story, and I admire the feisty friend waiting to come out.
At Love’s Bidding is quite different from Jennings’ other books – fewer cowboys, a weaker female lead – but the suspense and the twisting plot keep this book as a Jennings’ great. By the time I reached the end, I wasn’t ready to – I had fallen for the characters and wasn’t ready to turn the last page on them. I certainly hope Wyatt, Miranda, and the crew in Pine Gap make a reappearance in another Jennings’ book, because I want to hear more about them.
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Regina Jennings is a graduate of Oklahoma Baptist University with a degree in English and a history minor. She is the author of A Most Inconvenient Marriage, Sixty Acres and a Bride, and Caught in the Middle, and contributed a novella to A Match Made in Texas. Regina has worked at the Mustang News and First Baptist Church of Mustang, along with time at the Oklahoma National Stockyards and various livestock shows. She now lives outside Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, with her husband and four children.
Connect with Regina: website, Twitter, Facebook
I received a free copy of this book from LitFuse Publicity in exchange for an honest review.
