Tucker Dennis is having a bad day. Things aren’t going well on the job and he’s worried about his son (as usual). The note on his kitchen table is the topper, informing him that his father Harold has gone off and gotten himself married and is now honeymooning with his bride at the Blue Flamingo Motel. Tucker has a business he’s trying to get off the ground, a self absorbed ex-wife and a teenage son to deal with, and now it seems he has a stepmother thrown into the mix. What’s a guy to do? Tucker does the seemingly responsible thing and goes after his father.

Annie Summers and her cousin Bernice are as different as night and day. Besides a big difference in their ages, Bernice is loud and brassy while Annie is calm and understated. But Annie felt it was her responsibility to take in Cousin Bernice and her evil cat Zen when they needed a place to live. Annie has always tried to do the right thing and be the responsible one. All Bernice wants to do is live her own life. Bernice does this – in a big way. She goes off and marries Tucker’s dad, Harold. Annie just knows it’s up to her to save Bernice from trouble.

From the minute they meet at Bernice and Harold’s honeymoon hideaway, sparks fly between Tucker and Annie. First those sparks aren’t exactly friendly, but slowly the hostility changes to attraction. We can see that they are two lonely people searching for love, even if they don’t know it yet. Tucker and Annie are brought together again and again as they try to figure out what to do about their wayward relatives. Where will Harold and Bernice live? How will they make ends meet? And how should they handle their own attraction to each other? Slowly they come to realize that through Bernice and Harold, they have found companionship. They come to realize that, instead of coming home to a lonely house, they can come home to someone to love.

While Annie and Tucker fumble around each other, we begin to get a clearer view of them as people. Annie has lived her whole life being good and doing what was expected of her. She agrees to marry a man who’s never around because it’s safe and she doesn’t feel she can hope for any more than that. On the surface, Tucker seems like one of those heroes with a My woman has done me wrong so now I want nothing to do with any woman attitude. But the reader can almost feel his sadness and his frustration. He loves and cares about his son and wants to do right by him, but he’s not sure how to reach out. Tucker is afraid to open his heart again and Annie is afraid to open hers at all.

I did feel that Jay (Tucker’s son) and Eddie (Annie’s erstwhile fiance) were a little wooden, and I would have liked to have seen more depth in general from the secondary characters. There were a couple of key scenes involving secondary characters that seemed to be missing. While I know series romances are generally shorter, I think these two scenes would have fleshed the story out a bit more and resolved the conflict more completely.

Still, Annie and Tucker are an extremely touching couple. I enjoyed watching their dialogue and their unsuccessful attempts to fight their growing attraction. Author Browning provides a pleasant read and a sweet love story here. I look forward to trying more of her books.