Close Enough to Touch

July 9, 2012
Grace Barrett is on the run from an angry ex-boyfriend in Los Angeles. The last thing she planned to do in Jackson Hole, Wyo., was make friends. The plan was to hide out for a bit with her great-aunt, who rents out rooms, before making her way to Vancouver, but living across the hall from sexy cowboy Cole Rawlins complicates everything. Grace is a survivor, a teenage runaway who fought to get herself off the streets. She is suspicious of the town’s friendliness, mistrustful of Cole’s attempts to uncover every detail about her, and defensive about letting down her guard. Cole isn’t the only person trying to reach past Grace’s defenses, as her irascible Aunt Rayleen, cheerful bartender Jenny, and new boss Eve all have a thing or two to teach her about trust. The journey to healing and learning to accept love is gradual, and every step forward is something to cheer for. Agent: Amy Moore-Benson, AMB Literary Management.

September 1, 2012
Hot, contemporary "opposites attract" romance hits the emotional high notes as two struggling people find themselves and each other. Grace Barrett is forced by circumstances to accept a short-term home in Jackson Hole, Wyo., where she intends to keep to herself; not hard for the unemployed, purple-haired, prickly makeup artist who's been exiled from Hollywood and is biding her time in the small town until a new job starts in Vancouver. Or so she thinks. Faced with her red-hot neighbor, Cole Rawlins, a born-and-bred Wyoming cowboy, Grace enters into a scorching-hot affair, determined to keep her emotions strictly off-limits. Cole is anything but the Wild West equivalent of a dumb jock, and he knows he's playing with fire with his new city-girl neighbor. He's spent time in Tinsel Town and experienced firsthand its shiny facade and its uglier underbelly. At first wary of Grace's hard-edged persona, he's still attracted to her in spite of himself, and he falls into her bed to distract himself as he heals from a potentially life-altering injury. Both Grace and Cole tell themselves--and each other--that it's all about the sex, but it doesn't take Cole long to figure out Grace's diamond-hard exterior is simply a protective shell for a fragile emotional history, and he finds himself intrigued by and protective of the sensitive woman behind the hard-core image. When Grace takes a job with an area photographer that turns into an opportunity as a location scout, it opens her future in unexpected ways but sets up a collision of two worlds and confrontations from the past and the present for Grace and Cole. Rising romance star Dahl delivers with this sizzling contemporary romance. (Warning: Steamy situations and straightforward sexual descriptions are well-done and integral to the plot, but some scenes are pretty graphic for a mainstream romance.)

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August 1, 2012
Dahl moves from small-town Colorado (Talk Me Down, 2009) to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in this sexy contemporary romp. After she runs away from her boyfriend, Hollywood makeup artist Grace Barrett accepts her great-aunt's offer of a place to stay in order to regroup. She lands across the hall from working cowboy Cole Rawlins, who is recuperating from a broken leg and shattered pelvis after a horse fell on him. Although Cole resists his attraction to purple-haired Grace, he's drawn to her just as she is to him. But when a Hollywood film crew invades the ranch where Cole works, he and Grace bump up against people in their pasts and realize that if they have any hope of ever getting together permanently, they'll have to shed memories and regrets before they can become whole again. Dahl masterfully juxtaposes the beauty and majesty of the Teton mountains with the Hollywood facade and movie make-believe to dig deeply into how hopes and dreams can either come true or turn to dust.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)