Maggie Stanley runs out of her home with her infant son to escape a terrible man. She gets on a train hoping to get to safety and encounters Rafe Kendrick, a man riding the rails to hide from his past. Rafe can't help but rush to Maggie's rescue. Maggie keeps trying to leave Rafe even though she feels grateful until Maggie's health takes a turn and Rafe is the only one to keep her safe. Upon the arrival of her evil stepfather, Rafe decides he must take his rightful place among his family so he can protect Maggie and her son. He whisks her home and marries her to protect her and tries to convince her he wants this to be a real marriage all while trying to keep her stepfather away from her.

I'm not a huge fan of damsel stories. I tend to sit back and wish for the heroines to save themselves. Maybe they need some help but I want them to figure things out. Sure Maggie gets her chance in the last fifty pages but she spends the first 200+ being the damsel. She whines about being the damsel and keeps trying to leave but at the same time she never actually does anything about it. She lets Rafe rescue her again and again. I understand her initial logic because she had nothing to fight back with but once she married Rafe she could have taken on a little more agency. Instead she sort of laid there and felt sorry for herself.

In a weird way this story wasn't the heroine's which is odd in a romance. This was really Rafe's story. This was his story of coming to terms with his wife and kids dying. It was him returning home and taking his rightful place on the ranch. It was him falling in love and building a life. I was on board with it but it struck me as odd. I expected the book to follow Maggie and it really didn't. It was a nice touch.

I really enjoyed this book and I plan to continue with book two. I'm waiting for it at the library but it could be awhile. In the meantime I'm checking out more romances again.

Read my review at https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3004961088

In Baby Love, a young woman runs away from home with her baby to escape a painful past and runs into Rafe, a cowboy bum she meets in a train car. When Maggie needs his help, Rafe assumes responsibility despite painful reminders of his own tortured life and makes her an offer she can't refuse. Will they find a way to happiness together or will their pasts come back to haunt them?

Baby Love is the first in the series and a wonderful introduction into Catherine Anderson's writing. She always pens such compelling novels with wonderful characters like in this story: a woman on the run and afraid, and a man who has lost everything, yet still has the capacity to love deeply. Rafe was a great man for Maggie and patient with her fears most of the time. He is definitely what she needed, but he has a temper. There was one scene in particular that surprised me because in the past he had been so wonderful, but then he turned around and in his reaction was cruel, which I didn't like.

This was certainly a book I was able to get lost in, like all of Catherine Anderson's books I have read, and I really liked the suspense part of the novel. I just knew there would be trouble in this book, and it was written very well and kept me entertained. I will definitely read this story again, as well as the other stories in the series.

I would recommend Baby Love to anyone who likes a western romance with some suspense thrown in for good measure.

This is a fantastic book, although it's a romance it's good because there is a plot to it and it builds very slowly. It takes a while and Rafe is a very understanding character and although he starts off very controlling he soon changes his ways. I have read this series a number of times and always enjoy the books.

Baby Love is the first book in the Kendrick/Coulter/Harrigan series and I really enjoyed this book. Maggie and Rafe just touched at my heart strings and I just loved seeing them together. I can’t wait to read the next book in the series.

I love this book. It's full of all my favorite romance tropes, babies, women on the run, a man "saving" a woman who turns out to be saving them right back.

Could it be more realistic? Sure, but it wouldn't be as good in my opinion. The charm of Baby Love is the sweetness, the innocence, the characters that just fit from the moment they meet.

This is probably my favorite Catherine Anderson book, one of the ones I pull out when I'm having a bad day and just need something uplifting to read.