Please
give the elevator pitch for The True Cowboy of Sunset Ridge.
When Mallory Chance finally ditches her
deadbeat boyfriend and moves to Gold Valley, Oregon to start over she's ready
for adventure. So when she locks eyes with a hot cowboy across the bar in town,
she decides to throw caution to the wind and do something she's never done
before - have one hot night with a stranger.
But her hot night is complicated by the
fact that it turns out her anonymous hook up is Colt Daniels - related to her
brother by marriage, and also, her new landlord. And when Colt ends up caring
for his deceased friend's tiny baby, he needs help. But playing house with
strong, handsome Colt makes Mallory long for things she thought she'd let go
of. In the end will they be torn apart, or will they be able to set aside their
grief and make a family?
Which
came first, the characters or the plot line?
Colt and Mallory have both been in
different books in the Gold Valley series, so they came first for me, and then
when it was time to tell their stories, the plot came from them. That's how it
usually works for me, characters come in strongly first and then I figure out
how to place them.
Why
do you love Mallory and Colt and why should readers root for them?
Both Mallory and Colt have suffered a lot
of loss in their lives, but they both give a lot to their families, but have a
hard time accepting love for themselves. Also, there's a gratuitous scene where
Mallory walks in on Colt in the bath tub, and i was really rooting for them
both there.
What
was your last 5 star read?
I'm Only Wicked With You by Julie Anne
Long. The hero, Hugh Cassidy is one of the best romance heroes I've ever read.
He's a rogueish American and the way he plays off of the very aristocratic
heroine is so perfect. It's breathtakingly romantic, and everyone should read it
right now!
What
is one thing about publishing you wish someone would have told you?
I'm glad that I
didn't know too much about publishing when I started out! I didn't have any
expectations, I was just amazed that someone thought my book was good enough
for people to read. And when things get challenging in publishing - as they
sometimes do - I try to go back to that simple thing. I get to write stories,
and people read them. And it doesn't get more amazing than that!
THE TRUE COWBOY OF SUNSET
RIDGE
Author: Maisey Yates
ISBN: 9781335620965
Publication Date: December
28, 2021
Publisher: HQN Books
Book Summary:
When a bull-riding champion is left
holding his friend’s baby, could it be time to put down roots in Gold Valley?
Midwife Mallory Chance is ready
for a fresh start in Gold Valley. And when she locks eyes with a handsome
cowboy across the saloon, it feels like fate. After too many years wasted on
her cheating ex, good girl Mallory is read to cut loose and prioritize herself.
But when the dust settles on their hot night, it turns out that her mysterious
one-night cowboy is none other than her new landlord – and someone she’ll be
seeing very regularly around Gold
Valley…
Bull rider Colt Daniels has a wild
reputation, but after losing his friend on the rodeo circuit, he's left it all
behind. If only he could walk away from his guilt as easily…or the temptation
of Mallory! He can’t offer her the future she deserves – what does a cowboy
with a heart as damaged as his know about forever? Then his friend's tiny
daughter ends up in Colt's care, and he's in over his head. Colt has never
wanted to rely on anyone, but he needs Mallory's help taking care of the baby
he's beginning to love as his own. But is it all still temporary, or is it
their chance at a forever family?
Buy Links:
Excerpt:
CHAPTER
ONE
It was him. The man.
The fantasy man. The one who had haunted her dreams for the past six months.
And he was just like
Mallory Chance remembered him.
Tall, broad
shoulders, broad chest. Tight black T-shirt and black cowboy hat. His
midsection looked hard and solid, and so did his thighs.
He was the sort of
man who would have terrified her when she was a teenager. Far too much
masculinity to cope with—and why bother?—when there were soft, gentle boy band
members to fantasize about from the safe distance of a bedroom wall poster.
The sort of man she’d
never had the chance to lust after because she’d made her choices about men at
fifteen—again, when she’d been more into boy bands than bad boys and had
proclaimed chest hair “gross”—and had therefore been stuck with her teenage
sensibilities even as she’d transitioned into adulthood.
He looked like
danger. The kind you ran from when you were a girl and wanted to run to when
you were a woman.
The hardest-looking
man in the room.
The one who would win
the bar fight.
The one whose muscles
looked like they could carry the weight of the whole world. Or possibly just
handily beat up her trifling ex.
But it wasn’t enough
that the man had the most incredible body she’d ever seen.
He had dark blond
hair, dark stubble covering a square jaw. His mouth was perfectly formed, and
while she’d never given much thought to what constituted a perfectly formed
mouth, it turned out she knew it when she saw it.
But his eyes…
That night in the
Gold Valley Saloon, six months ago, while she’d been seated next to her
boyfriend, they’d locked eyes.
And she’d felt it all
the way down to her core.
Like a bolt of
lightning.
An electric current
that had run beneath her skin and down to her bones and had left her feeling
changed.
It had been a moment.
A brief moment. But she hadn’t been sure how she would breathe through it, let
alone carry on like it hadn’t happened.
She’d never
experienced anything like it before.
Like she was staring
down fate in cowboy boots.
But that had to be
ridiculous because she didn’t believe in things like that, and if she did,
she’d have to claim Jared as her fate, not some random guy in a bar.
Jared, the man she’d
been with since she was fifteen years old.
What was that if not fate?
At least, that was
what she told herself. For a long time. Too long.
Fate.
The word whispered
over her skin, the concept like firecrackers going off in her stomach.
It was why she had come here tonight, and she
would be lying if she said that wasn’t true.
All the whole way
from San Francisco she had played the music as loud as she could, had rolled
the windows down and shouted Taylor Swift lyrics into the wind. Because her
world had been broken open, and because Jared had hated that music.
And it didn’t matter
what he liked or didn’t like.
Not anymore.
So she’d done it,
because she could. And she had ignored the ten times her cell phone had rung
with his number flashing across the screen.
She wasn’t taking him
back. Not this time. Not ever again.
In the past he’d left her, and she was the one
who felt lost. And every time, she’d just get used to him being gone, he’d call
and she’d pick up. She’d tell him to come home. Because she needed him.
She hadn’t known how
not to need him. And she’d done her best to make sure he needed her. Because it
was in that space where she felt right. Like she was doing the right thing, and
like she mattered.
That sweet spot of
contentedness and a little bit of penance.
Not this time. This
time she’d done the leaving.
With very little
forethought, and nothing more than a couple of haphazard emails, she had
decided to uproot her entire life and go to the town of Gold Valley.
Mallory had been
enchanted by Gold Valley from the first time she had come to visit her brother,
Griffin.
She and her parents
had come six months ago, along with Jared. It had been wonderful. And he had been horrible. And all of the
doubts that bubbled up on occasion had come roaring to the surface during that
week.
He’d been bored at
dinner; he’d been completely uninterested in all of the quaint brick buildings
in town. He’d overslept and missed family breakfasts.
In general, every
single one of his bad qualities, every single thing that Griffin hated about
him had been on full display.
Your brother already hates me. I’m not going to perform.
He’d said that while
lounging in the passenger seat of her car, his sunglasses on, holding his phone
up, paying it more attention than he did her, as usual. In the years since
they’d started dating, his blond hair had transitioned from floppy boy band to
man bun, which was the only way he’d transitioned from boy to man, really. He
was still handsome in that smooth way, slim and… Well she’d always found him…
Cute.
But he was much less
cute when bored and slumped in her car, texting on a phone she’d paid for while
he acted aggrieved by the vacation she’d also paid for.
He’d said that her
brother hated him. And it was true. Griffin did
hate him. But it was based on things like that, not on nothing.
Griffin had never
been shy about his feelings for Jared, and it had always hurt Mallory.
She’d idolized
Griffin all her life. Her older brother was her hero and always had been. A
shining beacon of everything good and successful. Her parents had always been
so proud of him. And so had she.
Eight years older
than her, she’d been ten when Griffin had moved out, and it had devastated her.
Even though it was the natural order of things. It had changed her world, and
she felt unspeakably lonely with him gone.
He’d gone off and
gotten his own life. Fallen in love, gotten married.
And then he lost his
wife and little girl, and Mallory had lost her beloved sister-in-law and
cherished niece.
Even though Griffin
had survived, in many ways she’d felt like she’d lost him too.
It was only since
he’d met Iris that Mallory felt like she really had them back.
Which, other than the
natural pull she felt to the town, had been the reason that she’d come to Gold
Valley.
She wanted to be near
her brother.
And she needed,
desperately, to be very far away from Jared.
Her rental wouldn’t
be ready for a couple of days, but she just… She hadn’t been able to stay. Not
anymore.
And there were a
whole lot of conversations that she was due to have. Mostly because Griffin
didn’t even know that she was moving to Gold Valley.
Her parents didn’t even know what she was
doing.
Par for the course, isn’t it?
Maybe. But there were
just… There were some things she just wanted to keep to herself. So she didn’t
have to feel the sting of their disappointment. Her own failures mixed together
with disapproval from the two people who mattered so much to her.
She’d always tried to
cover for Jared too. Every time he’d left and hurt her, she’d tried to minimize
it. Every time he’d spent three weeks or a month apart sleeping at another
woman’s house, only to come home, she’d tried to hide that.
And she’d tried to
forget it.
Her relationship with
Jared was fifteen years long. They’d grown up together. Well, he’d grown up
less, she’d grown up more. But they’d shaped their lives around each other and
she’d felt like…
Like he was the only
person who knew everything about her. Things she’d never shared with her
parents, never with her brother… He’d been there for.
And in the darkest
time, he had been there. And she’d
clung to that through every bump in their road.
But this time, he’d
cheated. They hadn’t been separated before he’d found his way into another woman’s
bed. She’d thought everything was fine. Great. Better than it had been for a
long while, in fact.
And that was what
hurt the most.
She gritted her
teeth. Feeling angry. And she looked back over at her mystery cowboy.
Yeah, the thing was,
he had probably cheated on her before. He had probably been cheating for their
entire relationship, and she had just believed him every time he ever said that
the only times he’d touched another person had been when they were on a break.
That had hurt. It
always had. Because she had never…
He was her one and
only.
And of all the silly
things that had enraged her, the one that had fueled her down I-5 the whole way
here, was… That.
Was the fact that she
had seen a man that had made her feel things just with one look that no one,
not even Jared, had ever made her feel before.
She’d felt that deep
connection back then. Sitting there with a man who was tipsy off his sixth
beer, which she’d paid for, while she
looked at another man who incited some kind of fire in her stomach—it felt
unfair. And in that period of time when she’d been in that house she used to
share with Jared in a town that she wanted to leave desperately, she just
decided she needed to… Go.
And she could stay in
a motel until the rental date.
But she needed to be
gone. And she had told herself that it wasn’t the vision of that man’s eyes
that had propelled her. She had told herself that it wasn’t why, after she
checked into the little Wine Country Motel on the edge of Gold Valley, she’d
taken a shower and freshened up, put on some makeup for the first time in three
weeks and a light, summer dress.
No, she had told
herself that none of those things had anything to do with her mystery man.
And then, when she
was bored and hungry and had bypassed any number of actual restaurants on the
main street of town, walking to the Gold Valley Saloon, she had decided that
there was no way she had any hope of seeing that man. Because what were the
chances?
But then, in the back of her mind it was
there. How people did like their regular bars. How it was possible.
But so not likely
that, six months from the first time she had seen him, he would be there. Just
happened to be there.
When she was free and
unattached, angry and needing desperately to reclaim something… Or rather, claim
it for the first time.
But there he was.
There he was. And she was frozen to the spot in that Western bar, her feet
grounded to the rustic wood floor. People were talking and laughing and dancing
all around her. Country music was playing over the jukebox, and there was
tension filling the air. Couples were everywhere. New and old, she imagined.
Some who had forever. Some who were looking for a night.
But he was alone.
Standing there at the back of the bar with the neon light from a beer sign
shining over him like an unholy sign from the heavens. She knew it was him.
Because she could never have confused him with anyone else. Sure, there were
other handsome men in the room. But none of them made her feel like fire.
None of them made her
feel like everything she’d ever known before was a pale, cardboard construct,
and he might be the only thing that was real.
The only thing that
could make her real.
She swallowed hard,
walking over to the bar. The bartender was a handsome man, broad chested with a
quick smile, tattoos up his brown forearms, a bright gold wedding band and a
twinkle in his eye. “Can I help you?”
“Yeah. I… Whiskey.
Please.”
“All right. Any
particular kind?”
She didn’t know
anything about whiskey. “Do you have a special kind that makes you brave?”
He grinned. “Even
cheap stuff will do that. Just comes with a headache.”
“It’s my experience
that just about everything in life comes with the headache,” she said, trying
to smile. And then she felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Goose
bumps broke out over her arms.
And the fire inside
her flared.
That happened a split
second before she heard a low, husky voice just behind her.
“It’s you, isn’t it?”
She turned, and there
he was.
Excerpted from The True Cowboy of
Sunset Ridge by Maisey Yates. Copyright © 2021 by Maisey Yates. Published by
arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
Author Bio:
Maisey Yates is a New York Times
bestselling author of over one hundred romance novels. Whether she's writing
strong, hard working cowboys, dissolute princes or multigenerational family
stories, she loves getting lost in fictional worlds. An avid knitter with a
dangerous yarn addiction and an aversion to housework, Maisey lives with her
husband and three kids in rural Oregon. Check out her website, maiseyyates.com
or find her on Facebook.
Social Links:
Author Website:
http://www.maiseyyates.com/
Facebook:
Maisey Yates - https://www.facebook.com/MaiseyYates.Author/
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