… she realized she wanted more. Not a husband or a bunch of kids burping on her clothes … but a life. A real one. A chance to figure out who she was…
When I read that Molly O’Keefe’s main character in Can’t Buy Me Love was inspired by Tyra Collette from Friday Night Lights (“Tyra times 10” is how she referred to her), I immediately set aside my deeply-held philosophical objection to images of creepy waxed man chests* to check out her take on one of my favorite fictional characters.
What I found in Can’t Buy Me Love was surprising.
You know I’m not a voracious romance reader, nor an expert on the subject like Rebeca is, so I probably have a lot of preconceived notions about what a Big R Romance is. Most of those notions went straight out the window with Can’t Buy Me Love.
Tara Jean Sweet is a prototypical woman from the wrong side of the tracks. She’s spent much of her life scrapping and fighting for every little thing she has. When she’s offered a stake in a Texas rancher’s leather business (she already designs items for the company) in exchange for a pretending to be his fiance in hopes of luring the rancher’s estranged children back to the ranch, she jumps at the chance. This is her opportunity to have something that’s hers, that’s legit—even if the means to that end are sketchy.
That rancher’s son is Luc, aging professional hockey player who’s literally suffered too many blows to the head as his team’s enforcer, and is facing a potentially career-threatening, if not life-threatening, brain injury if he doesn’t stop playing. His father soon dies after Luc and his sister (who’s a main character in O’Keefe’s novel, Can’t Hurry Love) descend on the ranch, leaving him obligated to fulfill a series of conditions of his father’s will—and making him Tara Jean’s boss.