“The Brands Who Came For Christmas” is a story as old as time. A story of an unplanned pregnancy, but Maggie Shayne gives it a twist that keeps you on the edge of your seat. 

Maya Brand was trying to earn the respect of the community. She didn’t run around and she went to church on Sunday. She was everything her scandalous family was not. What Maya wanted most was to be considered respectable. Tomorrow is Maya’s birthday, she will be thirty years and still a virgin. Then she looks up and to see a man enter her mother’s bar and her world turns upside down. Here is a man she has only dreamed of and he is looking straight at her.

   Cain Caleb Montgomery the third had been groomed from birth to become a Senator from the State of Oklahoma. His father was a Senator and his grandfather was a Senator. Caleb had never questioned that he would become a Senator as well, until during a planning session the group started talking about the perfect wife for him. She should be blond because blonds had a slight edge over brunettes and redheads and she should be smart but not better educated that he. Of course she would be pretty, but not too pretty because they didn’t want any backlash. At that, Caleb left the room without a word. He changed into jeans, borrowed the gardener’s old pickup and just started to drive. Fate in the form of a rainstorm and a flat tire stopped him in a little no name town in Oklahoma. 

Cain and Maya have one magic night before a phone call sends Cain rushing home. His father has had a stroke and by the time he is out of the hospital, Cain has convinced himself that he and Maya would never work.  Maya is convinced that Cain was just using her and she is better off without him when she goes into the doctor’s office. There, she discovers that forgetting Cain is going to be harder than she imagined and being respectable just became almost impossible.

   A fun story you won’t want to miss.

   Happy Reading, Linda