Nichole - Dirty H if you're nasty

This review is just for the title story, To Love a Cowboy. I did not read the second story, Justice. Sorry...

This was a story with lots of potential. Roan Bucklin grew up on his father's ranch, and has been in love with the ranch foreman, Patrick Lassiter, since he was 14. After leaving home at 18 to go to college and work at other ranches, Roan has now, at age 25, returned to his home to win the man he loves.
Patrick Lassiter is 45, and although he has a pretty good arrangement (i.e. friendship and great sex) with Tyler, he's always been in love with Roan, his best friend's son. Patrick knew Roan had a crush on him growing up, but he kept his distance due to the boy's age.
Now that Roan's back, the two men must overcome their personal obstacles to be together. Roan must deal with his jealousy of Patrick's friendship with Tyler, and Patrick must get over the fear that Roan's youth will eventually cause him to leave.

This could have been a great story, but instead it was only mediocre, due to a lot of issues, which fit into two categories: 1. Bad writing, and 2. the age difference.

The bad writing:
1. There were a lot of issues with shifting POV. If you're going to do a book that shifts POV, you need to give equal time, and you need to make it clear whose POV you're in at any given time. She would spend 10-15 pages from Patrick's POV, then shift to Roan for two paragraphs, then back to Patrick for five pages, then Roan for 2, etc. And there was no warning (i.e. page breaks), so you never really knew whose POV you were coming from. Then, after spending most of the book shifting between Roan and Patrick, she suddenly shifted to Tyler for a chapter. What the hell? There was even maybe one sentence in the beginning where she shifted to Roan's father, Finn. It was all over the place and very poorly done.
2. A lot of the backstory came out in dialogue, which is fine - I'm all about a writer introducing the backstory in an organic way rather than doing a big info dump at the beginning. But if you're going to do that, you have to do it in a way that feels natural. You can't have characters telling each other stuff about their past that the other person already knows/was present for. People just don't talk like that.
3. I'm a stickler for character development. I will never give a book 4 or 5 stars if I didn't connect to the characters and care for them. And if you don't develop them, I can't connect to them and the story just won't be as good. I never really fell in love, or even like, with these characters. They were just sort of... there.

The age difference:
Roan and Patrick have a 20 year gap. This might not bother me so much if Patrick hadn't known Roan since he was 10 and watched him grow up. But he did, and I found it a little creepy. I kept imagining if this were a straight romance, with a 25 year old woman and 45 year old man whom she had known since childhood... yuck. And Roan's father Finn, Patrick's best friend, knows all about it and is totally supportive. It just seemed weird to me. Again, if your 25 year old daughter told you she was in love with your 45 year old best friend and wanted to begin a sexual relationship with him... I don't know. Maybe in some circumstances this could have worked, but it just didn't work for me in this story.

Bottom line: Great idea, poor execution.