This book has three stories in it: Sweet Beginnings, Coffee and a Beagle, and Sugar Spice and Other Sassy Things.
Sweet Beginnings is the story of Mona, who runs away from a controlling family. They're trying to pressure her into a marriage she doesn't want. She puts her foot down and refuses to go along with the manipulation. Sneaking away, she ends up in Arizona where she gets locked in a closet at the construction site where Emmett is just trying to keep his job.
Mona is working for a powerful man who has his sights set on Mona. When she turns down his offer to be his new assistant, Emmett offers her sanctuary by posing as her fiance. He wants her to open a bakery with him, but they need time to get all the pieces in place.
The timeline on this one drove me insane. At the prologue, it says "Thirty Years Ago." I took that to mean when we hit chapter one, it was thirty years later. That would make Mona like fifty years old! Then I started reading about Emmett, who was 23. A bit confusing, but I think I figured it out later. The second story is about Mona and Emmett's daughter, so that story is the one that starts 30 years later than the first. I'll take credit for the confusion on that one, but it would have been clearer for someone who didn't know it was a parent-to-child progression for the second story to have the qualifier "Thirty Years LATER" attached to Jayna's story.
Okay, putting that aside, I had a problem with the "relationship." Emmett and Mona meet three weeks after she runs away from home. THEN, when her dad confronts her, he says they've been searching for two months. That means, at best, these two knew each other for maybe five weeks before getting married. And we don't read much of anything about those five weeks, since the focus is on the beginning of the story and the end. There's no middle. I'm all for love at first sight and all, but GEEZ. All I could think about was how would I feel about my daughter getting married to a potential axe murderer after a little over a month? Not good. That's how I'd feel.
The next story, Coffee and a Beagle, is about Jayna, one of Mona and Emmett's daughters. I only made it a short way into this one before I just let out a deep sigh and put the book down. The writing style was hard to read for me. Almost every time a character would say more than five words, they seemed to babble. Also, for some reason it drove me crazy there were so many commas missing. When you have two complete sentences joined by 'and,' 'but', etc. put a comma in there! Pass...
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