Description: 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 furious family, her grandfather tracks it to the Missouri Ozarks and makes an outlandish offer to buy the local auction house if they promise not to sell anything until he arrives.
Upon their arrival, however, they discover their new business doesn't deal in fine antiques, but in livestock. And its manager, ruggedly handsome 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 cattle than they can count--but no mysterious painting--Miranda and Wyatt form an unlikely but charged partnership to try and salvage a bad situation getting worse.
My Thoughts: I did not find this book as enjoyable as the first in the series. Whereas in the first novel the hero and heroine came from similar social classes and there was a strong conflict of mistaken identity and mistrust, this novel had a heroine and hero of completely different social classes with a conflict of misinterpretation of facts. While these conflicts can often be enjoyable, Miranda (and even at many points Wyatt) described the Ozark people in a fairly stereotypical, backwoods manner, leaving a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth.
The romance between Miranda and Wyatt was good, with Wyatt truly shining as a hero in the last half of the novel when he started to overcome his insecurities. There was also some great dialogue involving rhubarb pie and "Lady Godiva", that I found delightfully comical.
At Love's Bidding had its moments, most of them interactions between just Miranda and Wyatt. Yet I did not care for the representation of many of the other characters. They fell flat to me, like cutouts of real people. I still plan to read the next book, if there is one, as I had really enjoyed the first. I just was not a fan of this.
I received this book through Litfuse in exchange for an honest review.
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