Three tales of winter second chance romance will help keep you warm; personally I love to sit and relax with a book on snowy days.

CHRISTMAS WITH MY COWBOY is something of a misnomer. We only see cows in THE SNOW MAN by Diana Palmer, in which a young woman who inherits the ranch she left for a more sophisticated life has to make some difficult decisions. I'm surprised that Meadow Dawson keeps thinking of her (strangely unmarried) neighbour rancher Dal Blake as infuriating, insufferable; these terms befit romances of generations ago, while today we'd just call the man rude. Maybe a joke has to go a long way in those parts, but we seemed to get about ninety references to a red dress Meadow wore when she has seventeen. I enjoyed the large cat and dog who seem to be doing their best to draw the pair together, while a lively undercurrent is generated by Meadow's taking a job as police researcher.

KASSIE'S COWBOY by Lindsay McKenna is about a furniture maker, although he has two horses snugly rugged up in the barn during a Wyoming blizzard. As a former soldier, Travis Grant has found that carpentry is a good way to cope with occasional PTSD. A nice touch is that former girlfriend Kassie Murphy, whom he rescues from a crashed car on the icy road, runs a coffee shop to employ returned female soldiers. Kassie says one of the women gets stressed if she goes into a small dark store room to get things, so the solution Kassie found was to ask someone else to go there. What about providing safe lighting? Almost all this tale is told in thoughts about backstory, with this the only way to introduce other characters during the four day wait for the weather to clear.

Margaret Way has written the antidote to snow; a Christmas in Australia. HER OUTBACK HUSBAND provides a timely change of setting and weather. Scott and Darcey MacArthur appeared to be the perfect couple, but in a prologue lasting over thirty pages, Darcey's guardian aunt breaks the news that Scott has cheated and the other woman has confessed. Scott does actually have a family cattle station, but we never see it because we spend Christmas in the city of Brisbane instead. Parties and long ball gowns are the order of the day. Darcey has started her life again, but something tells her there is more to this tale than meets the eye.

Vigorous romances about determined women are a good way to start the year, so treat yourself to a good book by your favorite authors.