It’s probably unfortunate that Counterfeit Cowboy was paired with Tryst of Fate because the second story suffers by comparison. While it’s an okay read, it just doesn’t have the charm of the first story. As a result, reading them back-to-back didn’t work well for me.

Raleigh Tate isn’t a real cowboy. He’s an undercover agent for the Secret Service posing as a dude ranch foreman in order to catch some suspected counterfeiters. When very curvy Molly Broome appears and applies for a job, instead of the female agent he was expecting, Raleigh isn’t sure what to do with Molly – beside kiss her breathless within an hour of their first meeting.

As for Molly, she’s a died-in-the-wool member of The Cowgirl Club, a group of three Eastern women who each dreams of marrying a handsome cowboy. When Molly first sees Raleigh, he’s a horseman riding by, and she falls like a ton of bricks. Later, when she interviews for the job, he refuses to hire her, but she gets the job anyway thanks to the lustful owner of the dude ranch, middle-aged, paunchy Cord Wyatt.

The remainder of the story deals with Raleigh’s efforts to track the counterfeiters while keeping his hands off Molly, Molly’s efforts to keep Cord’s hands off of her while she figures how to get Raleigh’s hands back on her, the efforts of a little girl to take care of three foundling kittens, her mother the housekeeper’s efforts to land Cord, Grace’s (heroine of the first book in this series, Custom-Built Cowboy) efforts to match-make Molly and Raleigh, and some other goings on involving Raleigh’s partner agent and the counterfeiting ring.

There was nothing basically wrong with the story, it just didn’t spark my imagination. I didn’t care for some of the characters, yet no one was fully drawn enough for my to understand why I didn’t. Stories that are just so-so are hard to review, because it’s often difficult to put your finger on why a book didn’t work.

Regular fans of Ms. Alexander’s, or, if you’ve read the first in this trilogy, may enjoy Counterfeit Cowboy better than I.