Hailey Lambert needs a job so she can settle down. She does not know what she is getting into when she goes to the job interview for the business manager position at Clay Cardell’s ranch. Her mouthiness gets the best of her on more than one occasion, but that is not necessarily a bad thing considering Clay Cardell orneriness.

Clay does a good job trying to keep up his guard around Hailey because he has learned from experience that the people who are supposed to love you most often leave with a great deal of hurt and pain. Plus most women have an agenda to get what they want. Once the get it, they are done. No matter what Hailey did, he had to be put it all into context since she was foremost a woman.

As the reader finds out, the book gives some of the history that made Clay into the sad, lonely person he is the way he is. Constant emotional abuse is bound to leave lasting scars. Trouble is that those scars make it difficult for the person coming with true love to be accepted. So many times when Hailey would make progress, something would happen to plant another seed of doubt in Clay’s mind and have him questioning her motives all over again.

This story is about trust, patience, and the ability of love to heal invisible wounds. These are two imperfect, dysfunctional people who have enough in common with their core beliefs to make the relationship work. In the end, it is good for the both of them that Hailey did not give up on Clay because that would have made them both miserable. They were two of kind that were meant to be together.

That being said, this book is SUPER long. I read on my Kindle so I have no concept of book lengths these days. When I read a regular book, I average 100 pages a hour. I don’t know if that is speed reading but that is my average. When I started reading, Amazon said this book is about 400 pages. So I am thinking this would be about 4 hours of reading time. I ended up finishing 6+ hours later so I would estimate that the page count would be close to 600 pages. Unfortunately for me, I was reading this book on a work night and by the time the book got really interesting I should have been going to bed. It has always been hard for me to put a book down so close to the end, so I kept reading until I finished (late nights and early morning don’t mix well). So keep this in mind!  It is best to read this on a Saturday afternoon if you are like me and want to read the whole book in one sitting.

If you like Western romances, I suggest reserving the afternoon to read Taming Clay

***Additional side note*** there are quite a few f-b0mbs in this book, if strong language offends you. These are cowboys and cowgirls whose language can be coarse. Not everything will be “Aw shucks” and “Darn it”