Another Kind of Love

Another Kind of Love is a 1983 romance novel written by Mary Lynn Baxter and published by Silhouette Books (which would be purchased by publisher Harlequin the following year). The book is part of the “Men Made in America” series, which encompasses fifty books by different authors featuring “red-blooded, white-hot, true-blue hunks from every State in the Union,” according to back-cover copy. Another Kind of Love is the volume devoted to Arkansas, drawing upon the experience of the author who, when young, would spend summers with her family along Norfork Lake. Other volumes in the series include Nobody’s Baby (Nevada) and All in the Family (West Virginia).

Thirty-year-old Ali Cameron heads up Cameron Cosmetics in Manhattan. At the beginning of the novel, she has been dealing with the fallout from her late father having sold one of her secret cosmetics formulas to a competitor. Overcome with stress, she decides to get away from the business and her domineering mother and accept the advice of her doctor, who says to her that “you must heed my advice and accept your friend’s invitation to spend a few months on her dude ranch in Arkansas,” adding that he knows a medical specialist in Hot Springs (Garland County) who can oversee her health while she is in the state. The ranch in question is the Peaceful Valley Dude Ranch in the Ozark Mountains, bought the previous year by Cindy Medford, whom Ali met at “a small, elite college in northern New England,” and her husband, Barry.

Adam Forrest, a neighbor of the Medfords who is a wealthy rancher and veterinarian, picks Ali up from the airport in Fayetteville (Washington County), and she instantly reminds him of his ex-wife Mary, “big city born and bred.” Adam and Ali are simultaneously attracted to and repelled by each other. At the ranch, Ali reunites with Cindy, who is pregnant and who reveals that they have had to borrow money to make repairs to the ranch but have not yet attracted enough tourists to make it viable.

At a barbecue thrown by Adam, he and Ali spar verbally, and despite spending much of the evening dancing with his current (noncommitted) partner, Molly Deavers, he comes on to Ali, saying, “You’ve been dying of curiosity to know what it would feel like to have an Arkansas hillbilly kiss you, touch you.” As Cindy is having a difficult pregnancy, Ali takes over many of her responsibilities, putting her in greater contact with Adam, and despite their own intentions (and her physical inexperience), their attraction to each other grows, culminating in sex.

However, after spending an evening with Adam along the Buffalo River, she comes back to the Peaceful Valley Dude Ranch to find her uncle on the phone demanding she return to New York, as several stockholders have joined together in a plan to force the sale of Cameron Cosmetics. Adam is upset that she feels the need to leave, and when she and the Medfords go out to eat the evening before she leaves, she spies Adam with Molly Deavers and her son, dining together. But he later apologizes and asks her not to leave, and she calls her mother with news that she will be sending plans for a new perfume she has been formulating, hoping that this will stem any action by the shareholders for the time being.

The next morning, she and Adam have sex in his barn, and he confesses that he fell in love with her at first sight but was still reeling from his relationship with his moneyed, upper-class wife, who had an abortion because she did not want to bear a child with Adam because of his background (he was an orphan). Later that day, Cindy is hospitalized. The doctors are able to save the premature child, a daughter, but Cindy dies.

Three weeks later, Ali returns to New York to oversee the production of the new perfume and tie up loose ends. Being up in New York for two months makes her realize how much she has changed: “She no longer needed glamor and excitement to make her life complete.” Ali presents her mother with her own shares in the company and returns to Arkansas to marry Adam.

For additional information:
Baxter, Mary Lynn. Another Kind of Love. New York: Silhouette Books, 1983.

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas