The Surgeon's Christmas Baby is a delightful addition to Marin Thomas’s Cowboys of the Rio Grande series. This second installment features trauma surgeon Alonso Marquez and his unexpected romance with bison rancher Hannah Buck.

Disheartened by the losses he has experienced in both his professional and personal lives, Alonso is taking a much needed break from his job at an Albuquerque hospital. While hitchhiking across New Mexico, he meets Hannah and her half-brother Luke when he stops to help them change a tire. He and Hannah are immediately attracted to one another and they decide to throw caution to the wind and indulge in a no strings fling. After Luke is suspended from school, Alonso helps secure him a spot at a ranch for troubled youth run by the same people who helped him when he was a teenager. Deciding to stick around for a while to help Hannah, Alonso finds some much needed peace but when their night together leads to unexpected consequences, will he allow his fears to ruin their future together?

After the death of their father, Hannah willingly abandoned her plans to stay on the ranch as Luke’s guardian. She has never regretted her decision but they are barely scraping by and she has her hands full trying to keep Luke out of trouble. While she is trying to keep the ranch afloat, Luke is running wild and skipping out on chores. As if Hannah does not have enough problems to deal with, now she has to deal with a sudden rash of vandalism on the ranch. While she is not worried about taking care of things on her own, she does appreciate Alonso’s willingness to help out while Luke is gone.

Alonso is surprised by how much he enjoys the slower pace of life on Hannah’s ranch. His experiences have left him with an incredibly negative outlook on life and he is dreading his return to job. He has never had time for a relationship and his previous losses have left him with an irrational fear that he finds very difficult to overcome. When Hannah discovers she is pregnant, his kneejerk reaction is to leave but Alonso finds himself grabbing any excuse to delay his departure. Will an unanticipated job opportunity provide him with a reason to stay? Or will Alonso continue to let his fears keep him from fully committing to a future with Hannah?

The Surgeon's Christmas Baby is another wonderful installment in Marin Thomas’s Cowboys of the Rio Grande series. The romance between Alonso and Hannah is very sweet and remarkably free of angst or drama. The characters are beautifully developed with realistic issues to overcome. An understated but very enjoyable love story that old and new fans to the series are sure love. ( )

Very good book. Hannah is a young woman who is running the family bison ranch after the death of her father. She also has custody of her sixteen year old half brother. Luke hasn't dealt well with his father's death and has been running wild, getting into trouble. She's at her wit's end, trying to keep up with the ranch and ride herd on her brother. She's on her way home from picking Luke up at the jail when she nearly runs over a hitchhiker.

Alonso is a trauma surgeon from Albuquerque. After time as an army doctor, and now working in a big city hospital, he is feeling burned out. He is tired of fixing people up just to have them go back to doing what got them hurt in the first place. He has taken a leave of absence from the hospital and is hitchhiking aimlessly around the state, trying to get himself back together. His journey is interrupted when he stops to help Hannah change her tire and is invited to stay for dinner.

I really liked Hannah. She has had a lot of responsibility dumped on her from the time she was young. She's the one who has practically raised her brother and is frustrated by the problems she is having with him. She is also trying to bring the ranch back from the brink of disaster, after her father ran it into the ground. When she meets Alonso she is attracted to him, but she is also wary. She's been hurt once, and doesn't want to risk it again. But she's also been lonely, and is seriously thinking about giving in to the attraction just once.

I ached for Alonso. From his early life trying to stay out of the gangs in his neighborhood, to the losses he has experienced as a doctor, he has a very pessimistic view of life. He has avoided any kind of relationships, always expecting that they will end and preferring to protect himself from more losses. His attraction to Hannah is unexpected, as is his reluctance to leave as planned. I loved the way that he saw so much of himself in Hannah's brother Luke, and helped Hannah find a place for him with the people who had helped him. I also loved how Alonso decided to stay at the ranch and help Hannah while Luke was away.

The relationship between Alonso and Hannah grew pretty slowly. The physical side happened fast and burned hot, but trusting their feelings took awhile. Hannah doesn't want to fall for a man who is leaving, but his actions find their way past her walls. When she becomes pregnant she worries about how she'll manage, but refuses to doing anything to make Alonso feel like he has to stay. She sees that he has the ability to be a terrific father, but until he can believe she has to let him go. Alonso is surprised by the peace he starts to feel the longer he stays with Hannah. The constant stress of watching his work go for nothing is gone, but other fears are still with him. When he learns about her pregnancy, those fears make him want to run, but he also finds any number of reasons not to leave quite yet. I loved the unexpected opportunity that showed him the life that he could have away from the city, and the event that opened his eyes to what he would be leaving behind. Accepting Hannah's confidence in him helped him overcome those fears and believe that they could have that future together.

I also enjoyed the scenes on the ranch, as Luke got the guidance and discipline that he needed. The change in him was wonderful. Alonso's reunion with Cruz (A Cowboy's Redemption) was great, as was catching up with how things are going for Cruz and Sara. There was also a brief scene with their third friend, Vic, that was a nice lead in to his book. The mystery of who was doing the vandalism on Hannah's property was solved in a rather surprising way, as the culprit was not who I expected it to be. ( )