Spotlight & Giveaway: A Cowboy’s Salvation by Megan Ryder

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Megan Ryder to HJ!

Hi Megan and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, A Cowboy’s Salvation!

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

A Cowboy’s Salvation is ultimately about redemption and finding a home, for both of my characters. The series is about three boys who became foster brothers on the ranch after bouncing from foster home to foster home and finally settling here. Only, they displaced the daughter of the rancher, Tara Rawlings, who moved to San Francisco, marries and divorces and returns to save the ranch. Both the characters have to confront the past and see if there is a way to move on together.
 

Please share the opening lines of this book:

Tara Rawlings Gordon stood in front of the bay windows in the front room that was their conference room of the Queen Anne house that doubled as the office space for their interior design firm, Design Lines. The four young software designers who sat around the other end of the oval table studied her and her designs impassively, not giving anything away. Designing office space for a start-up software company was a new venture for her firm, mostly used to dealing with homes and smaller offices like law firms and such.

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

I always struggle with titles for books but the series title and name for the ranch came pretty quickly to me – Redemption Ranch. The characters all are looking for some sort of redemption for something in their lives. In this book, Tara is looking for a do-over in her life, with her relationship with her father. When she gets word that he died, she feels like she can never fix that relationship and she has so much guilt over it and can never been redeemed. West, for his part, has stepped into her place on the ranch, taking her spot and maybe contributed to the severing of the relationship between father and daughter, yet he also is protective of the man who was his only father figure, after a lifetime of abandonment on his own. He also sees this man as a savior and he wants to prove himself worthy. The title came from variations for Redemption – A Cowboy’s Salvation.

I was not a big country music fan but I love listening to music when I write so I developed some playlists for this book including a mix of country and non-country.

• Sit Still, Look Pretty – Daya
• Leaving on a Jet Plane – John Denver
• Hangin’ on – Chris Young
• Beautiful Crazy – Luke Combs
• Speechless – Dan + Shay
• Blue Tacoma – Russell Dickerson
• Kiss Somebody – Morgan Evans
• Amazed – Lonestar
• Need You Now – Lady Antebellum
• Just a Kiss – Lady Antebellum

Please tell us a little about the characters in your book. As you wrote your protagonist was there anything about them that surprised you?

Tara Rawlings is very sassy and smart, and very sharp. She had a strong protective shell around her to keep people out and keep her safe. She’s developed that over a long time, being on her own since she was a teenager when she was sent away to Boarding School after her mother died. I didn’t expect her to be so lonely. I started to write her as a spoiled, city girl but she was more than that; she wanted a place to belong and her loneliness kept coming out in the book in subtle ways.

West was a quiet, laconic guy who was protective of his foster brothers and the ranch, which I always knew about him. As a foster kid, he was caught stealing a car and then sent to the ranch as a last resort instead of juvie. What he found, instead of another foster home was his final home and a place he could belong. But, what he thought was his home was never the final place until he gave his whole heart to Tara. For West, I never realized how lonely he was too, isolated by his own protective instincts and his own sense of responsibility. He had kept himself isolated until Tara came and pushed her way into his heart.

If your book was optioned for a movie, what scene would you use for the audition of the main characters and why?

This scene shows their basic external conflict, showing how they really feel about each other at the beginning of the book. What I love about this snippet is we see both characters acting on their gut reactions and their misunderstanding about each other yet there’s an underlying attraction that really just irritate the heck of them.

“Tell me, are you happy now? I don’t know how you did it, but you played on a sick man’s emotions and stole my legacy from me. I’ll figure it out, you know. I’m sure this isn’t legal.”
Well damn, if she didn’t fight like a cornered wolverine. If he wasn’t so damned mad about her accusations, he’d be a little bit turned on right now, which probably made him some sort of sick, twisted bastard. Instead, he focused on being pissed off and filed the unwelcome attraction as a by-product of long days calving and not enough time at The Rock, the local bar and grill.
He leaned against the SUV, willing his muscles to relax. “Go ahead, sweetheart. Check with all the lawyers you want. Douglas was in perfect mental health, but you would know that if you visited more than once every couple of years or so.”
Her face paled and she flinched as if his words physically struck her. “You have no idea what’s been going on in my life. I’ve been building my career, doing what my father wanted me to do. If he had wanted me here, he would have told me, not sent me away.”
He leaned forward, looming over her. “He did call you, many times, asking you to come back over and over. But you couldn’t even be bothered to talk to him, could you? I was here. My brothers were here, working side by side with him, for years. Maybe he felt we needed a reward. Besides, you don’t plan on staying. What does it matter to you? Nothing has changed for you. Go home and collect your checks from the ranch.”
Tara sucked in a breath and poked a finger in his chest, pushing him back against her SUV. “You listen to me. I’m going nowhere until we settle this. And don’t get too comfortable, Weston Morgan. This isn’t over. Now, get the hell off my car.”
He smirked. Damn, she was getting him a little hotter with her fire and brimstone. He obligingly took a step to the side with a little bow. She glared at him then hitched her sack of a purse over her shoulder and stalked across the lot toward the office. He waited until she was almost to the porch then called out to her.
“Oh, Tara?” He held up the manila envelope. “Do you want a copy of the will and papers?”
The look on her face was priceless. She closed her eyes for a long moment, probably praying for strength or imagining ways to kill him, then she walked back to him and reached for the envelope. Just before she took it, he pulled it back.
“What do you say?”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” She planted her hands on her hips and looked like she was about to haul off and hit him.
He grinned, more than a little hot that he got her to swear. “It’s a simple word. Maybe you’ve heard of it, even in San Francisco. We use it all the time out here in Granite Junction.”
She narrowed her eyes and if looks could kill, well, he’d be lying in the gravel, blood pooling around him from several stab wounds. Finally, her mouth twisted as if she tasted something sour and said, the word barely audible, “Please.”

What do you want people to take away from reading this book?

I’d like people to mainly have some fun and escape from their real life for a while and enjoy a happy love story because we all need the happy ending. But, if you’re looking for a theme, this book is about family, the ties of family, not just your family by blood but the family you create.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have planned?

I am currently working on book two in the series, tentatively titled Coming Home to the Cowboy, about Chase. That will be out this fall. And I am looking forward to book three about Ty and his story coming out early next year. I love Redemption Ranch and all the associated characters.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: eBook of A Cowboy’s Salvation by Megan Ryder

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Excerpt from A Cowboy’s Salvation:

Tara stopped her car and stared at the turn off for the Double R Ranch. She opened and closed her fingers to work out the kinks from clenching the steering wheel for the past twenty-two hours since she left San Francisco, a trip that should have taken eighteen but had stretched thanks to numerous road construction delays and heavy spring rains through Nevada and Idaho. All she wanted was a warm bed, preferably in a space that wasn’t moving and wasn’t in Montana. But life was full of things she wanted and never got, including a father who was alive and a relationship with him. Now it was too late, and she’d have to figure out how to deal with that.
The driveway to the Double R Ranch stretched out almost a mile, the ranch house hidden behind a low rise in the distance, but she knew it was there. Even if it had been two years since she had visited. Split rail fences lined the paved road that wound its way to where the house and barns stood, just out of sight of the road. She could continue driving. No one would see her. The pastures and fields were empty. The cattle were in the upper grazing grounds by this time of year. Only the cows who hadn’t given birth yet were kept closer to the barns beyond the ranch house and there should only be a few by this time. No one to see her cutting and running like a coward.
The sun glinted low on the horizon and exhaustion permeated every muscle of her body. She didn’t have the energy to drive another couple hours to Missoula and she refused to get a room in the small hotel in town. Wouldn’t that cause a stir? Tara Rawlings avoiding her own ranch and staying somewhere else. No, she refused to be chased out of her own ranch for anyone, even herself.
Especially not Weston Morgan.
She could almost hear her father’s voice in her head. Time’s a-wasting, girl. Get moving before the sun goes down on you.
She put her blinker on and drove the winding mile, keeping a keen eye out for any sign of activity. When she pulled into the ranch house yard, it was strangely devoid of people, although she supposed that wasn’t that odd. The ranch hands were probably working in the pastures, checking on the cattle and the fences. Then they’d head for the various bunkhouses for dinner and the evening, not to the main house. There was little else in the ranch house to deal with until sundown.
She had half-expected West to be waiting for her, a disapproving expression on his face, although why she cared what he thought was beyond her. He had never been her biggest fan, especially since her college days. Nothing she had done satisfied him. Instead, her mere presence was often an affront to him, although it really should have been the other way around, considering the way he had stolen her place at the ranch and with her father. But that was the past and she had made her own path, had been forced to many years before, and she had succeeded.
She studied the sprawling ranch house, the one her father had built for her mother when they had first married. Not much had changed since she had last been back, although it was a bit more worn and aged than she had remembered, as if her father had stopped taking care of the place. The area in front of the large white farmhouse-style ranch home was mostly hard-packed dirt and gravel, with a small area in the center for grass. When her mother had been alive, it had been a welcoming patch of riotous color from flowers and green grass and a bench where she and her mother would wait for her father and his hands to come in from working the cattle. Her mother would sew or knit or read while Tara would play or do her homework. Now, the patch was barren; the grass barely there and the paint on the bench all flaked and weathered.
She parked next to a mud-crusted black monster truck and the much older pickup that had belonged to her father. She smiled at the sight of the truck that was more rust than red, glad to see one thing hadn’t changed on the ranch in all her years away. No matter how many times she had nagged him, he hadn’t given up Betsy. The damned truck was a menace, not only to her father but to anyone else on the road. One small accident and the whole vehicle would collapse around the driver and leave metal dust scattered around him, along with springs and leather seats. She caught her bittersweet smile in the rearview mirror at the thought. Funny how she always thought that damned wreck of a truck would be her father’s downfall. Well, at least he went doing something he loved on the land he cared more about than anything or anyone else.
Chickens strutted around the yard, pecking for insects, the only sign of life. An occasional neigh from the horses in the corral by the fancy new barn but no voices so she assumed everyone was out working. As expected, the barn was in far better shape than the house, par for the course for her father, who always took care of the ranch, the animals, and the business before his family. She sighed, thinking of her parents’ shouting matches when her father would come home late in the evening after riding the range or working in the calving barn, when her mother would have preferred him home. And after her mother had died, how quiet the house had been. Tara understood better now how the ranch took precedence, but it still hurt to know business and the job came before all else. And he never even tried to integrate them into his life, keeping them separate from the inner workings, but it only kept them apart from him, severed their ties as a family so they could not survive when things got really rocky.
No one came out to investigate her car and Tara was glad. She needed some time to adjust to being home, although it didn’t really feel like home. It hadn’t in years. Maybe it never did. Thank God no one was around while she was readjusting to the ranch. The last thing she needed was someone watching her, judging her, while she wandered around here, lost in her thoughts. Besides, she hadn’t exactly called anyone with a time or date to be expected, so no one would have been waiting. Not that there was anyone left to care about Tara, here or anywhere else.
She grabbed her purse and overnight bag, leaving the bulk of her luggage in the SUV, the only memento of her marriage that she was glad to have kept. She stretched, her muscles protesting the movement after being crammed behind the wheel for so long. Get in and get out, that was the name of the game. She didn’t want to be stuck in the back-ass part of Montana, or any part of Montana, longer than she had to.
She threw her bag over her shoulder and crossed the dirt yard, her heels wobbling a little on the uneven ground. She paused at the porch, where the swing remained, creaking in the gentle breeze, though it looked a little worse for wear, like no one had sat on it or the porch in some time. A couple of worn cane chairs were scattered on the porch, missing some of the wood weaving, surrounding an old, scarred table that she vaguely recalled her father making in the old wood shed when she was a kid. Her mother hadn’t wanted it on the porch back then, saying it wasn’t finished. He had promised to sand it and paint it, but here it stood, unfinished, a reminder of all that was lost in her past.
The front door was closed, and she had a moment of panic, but the knob turned easily, unlike in San Francisco. She took a deep breath and stepped into her past. The sunlight couldn’t quite filter through the windows and the drawn curtains, and Tara half-expected her father to come stomping down the hall from the kitchen. The smell from his cigar lingered in the air, stale and old but familiar even after all of these years, and tears threatened. She blinked rapidly and strode further into the house, resolutely ignoring the ghosts that grasped at her from the shadows of the living room. She was too tired to deal with them. There would be plenty of time for that later, when it came time to clean out everything.
“Hello? Is anyone home?”
Silence. Well, there would be no surprises then.
Feeling oddly bereft, she stood at the bottom of stairs. Food or sleep? Which did she need more? Her stomach rebelled at the thought of any food, thanks to a steady fare of Diet Coke and junk food she’d ingested on her journey, making up for the years of health food, juicing, and cleanses her husband had insisted on to keep her weight down. Maybe she could have used one of them now to ease the sugar bloat, not that she ever wanted to admit the pansy-assed traitor was right about anything.
Sleep, it was.
She headed up the stairs for her old room, the steps creaking under her weight. Instinctively she avoided the fifth step and the center of the seventh where the sound was the loudest. When she realized what she was doing, she laughed, as if her father cared about her sneaking in now. She rounded the corner and avoided looking at the bedroom right across from the top of the stairs—her father’s room. The door was closed, solid and forbidding, just like in life. She lifted her hand and pressed it to the wood, holding it there for a moment, then dropped it, not quite ready to deal with that Pandora’s box.
She needed to be prepared for the funeral tomorrow.
She turned and followed the railing around the open stairwell to her old bedroom, a place she had only rarely slept in since she was a teenager. She opened the door to an explosion of male clothes. A couple of pairs of jeans were tossed over a chair in the corner, while a few shirts had fallen on the floor just outside of a duffel bag. Socks and underwear also littered the area around the duffel and a scuffed pair of boots. The bed, no longer the purple and white from her teenaged years, was now a more masculine color scheme with brown, maroon, green and tan striped comforter, carelessly tossed back over tan sheets. A stack of magazines was tossed haphazardly on the nightstand and she didn’t dare peek at the titles, although a quick glance showed bulls and cowboys so hopefully the rest were also rodeo related.
She closed the door. Maybe another room. She walked across the way to the guest room that her mother had decorated in shades of yellow. It had changed to a much more utilitarian style. The bed, also masculine in shades of hunter green and maroon, but made this time, was neat as a pin. No clothes decorated the simple Shaker desk. In fact, nothing at all was on the desk. A beat-up classic guitar sat on a stand in the far corner next to the window, the only personal effect in the sparse room.
She sighed and headed for the third door on the floor, hoping against everything that this last room was now unoccupied. Unless something had radically changed, which was highly unlikely, this room belonged to the person who had replaced her in her father’s eyes and on the ranch.
Weston Morgan.
She turned the brass knob and opened the door to a room her teenaged self had always wanted to enter but never had to guts to explore, not with her father just down the hall, and definitely not with West’s own demeanor toward her. The room was a bachelor’s room, masculine in color, similar to the other rooms, but more lived in. The queen-sized bed was made neatly, almost military in its precision, but a worn cowboy hat hung off a rack on the wall next to a fleece-lined jacket and a flannel shirt. The closet door was slightly ajar as if the owner had run out quickly that morning, and Tara resisted the urge to snoop further, years of her father forbidding her from even setting foot in that room still echoing in her head.
Instead, she backed out of the room and closed the door softly. Well, that was it then. She truly had been replaced, with no bedroom left for her in the house. She headed back down the stairs to find the guest suite toward the back. It had once been her parents’ room, until her mother’s death. They had donated her mother’s clothes and gotten rid of the bed, but her father had never slept another night in there, as far as she knew. He had filled it with a generic bed from a mail-order place in case of guests, which had never happened, and moved himself upstairs, leaving the room unused. At least she hoped so. It would truly suck to not even have that room as an option.
She almost expected to see her mother laying in the bed with her IV and the smell of the sickness hanging in the air. Instead, the room was bare, an old crazy quilt she recognized from her mom laid across the bed with a pillow on the queen-sized bed, the colors faded with age. The room itself was a bit chilly and the air smelled a bit stale, but it was clean and, even more importantly, no evidence of anyone living in here. Tara tossed her bag in front of the dresser and climbed onto the bed, wrapping an old, crocheted afghan that was folded at the foot of the bed around her and snuggled into the bed.
Exhaustion tugged her under, and she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

West finished wiping down Black Jack and ducked under the crossties, neatly avoiding the horse’s clamping teeth on his shoulder. Anyone would think the damned horse would be grateful to be clean and dry after a full day of work and know that only West would be the one feeding him. Taking a bite out of the man who fed him wasn’t the way to get the good stuff in the stall. But Black Jack also knew that if he wasn’t fed, well, West would have to ride a different horse, and the damned devil was one of the best cutting horses and could find a lost calf as good as any cattle dog out there, even his dog Harley, who was out chasing chickens. Dumbass. He glared at the horse, but the beast only lifted his head and stared out of the barn as if West wasn’t there.
A low laugh from the other stall made West turn, and that was when Black Jack struck, hard and fast. West slid to the side and Jack only got him with a glancing blow on the shoulder. “Bastard.”
“I see he’s still having you for dinner.” Chase chuckled and leaned against the stall door.
“I should turn him loose and see how he likes fending for himself some night against the wolves,” West muttered to the man who was, for all intents and purposes, his younger brother.
“You’d never do that. You love that beast even if he’s left more scars on you than the rodeo bulls have left on me.”
West grunted and led Jack into the stall, making sure there was hay and fresh water for him. He closed the stall door and put some feed in the trough and walked down the aisle, checking the other horses while his younger brother followed.
“Do you think I haven’t already done this? I may have been gone for the past several months, but I know how to bed down the horses. Besides, the guys will be in later to check before bed. Maybe Ty can sing them to sleep too,” Chase grumbled behind him.
West stopped abruptly and Chase ran into him. “Ty has enough to deal with. We all do. Let’s get to the house and get this over with.”
“When is the princess coming anyway? I would have thought she would have been here before now, with the funeral tomorrow.”
West and Chase left the barn and joined Ty, who stared at the unfamiliar red SUV parked next to West’s Ford F-350 truck. “She may already be here. Unless that’s another one of Chase’s buckle bunnies.”
Both men turned and Chase held up his hands. “I don’t know how they find me, but I swear, I wasn’t expecting anyone. And none of my ladies would ever drive that. Please.”
“I don’t think any of them could be called ladies.” Ty snorted.
Chase punched him in the arm. “All women are ladies. No wonder you’re alone and pathetic.”
“Better alone than needing antibiotics,” Ty shot back.
West elbowed between the two brothers. “Enough. Can’t you let it alone for a couple of days?”
Both Chase and Ty sobered immediately. “Think that’s her?”
He shrugged. “Let’s go find out. If so, she’s cutting it close with the funeral tomorrow.”
“We couldn’t have it without her. She’s his daughter,” Chase pointed out. West called for Harley and headed toward the house, the dog and his brothers falling in line for dinner.
“She could have let us know when she was coming. Len at the funeral home told us she confirmed the dates and she’s been in the wind since. It’s been a week. She chose this date, not anyone else. I would have thought she would have been here sooner.”
“Maybe she couldn’t get away or her husband had something going on at his big company,” Ty pointed out from West’s other side.
Chase rolled his eyes and groaned dramatically, staggering to the side as if stabbed in the chest, then righting himself. West grimaced but didn’t say anything. No one liked Mark Gordon, Tara’s husband, a poor excuse for a human being, but they wouldn’t tell her that. Although, Douglas had expressed concern about Mark to Tara the last time they had visited. Chase was on the rodeo circuit, and West and Ty opted to head out on calf watch in the barn to avoid the shouting from Douglas’s study. Somewhere around dawn, Tara and Mark had left in a cloud of dust and gravel and she hadn’t returned to the ranch since then, breaking Douglas’s heart. Now she was back, and no one quite knew how to deal with it, or how long she’d be staying. Hopefully, just long enough for the funeral then back to her life in San Francisco.
They knocked the majority of the dirt off their boots at the back door, then headed through the mud room and into the kitchen where Marie Baxter bent over the oven checking on what smelled like a roast. West inhaled appreciatively and dropped a kiss on the top of the older woman’s head.
“You’re a lifesaver, Marie. We’re starving.”
Chase grabbed the woman in a bear hug, lifting her not-inconsiderable frame off the ground. “You make me want to stick around and not head back to the circuit, Marie.”
She smacked Ty’s hand as he reached for a biscuit. “None of that until you wash up. And we’re waiting for Miss Tara. Where is she?”
West shook his head. “I have no idea. We’ve been out riding fences and looking for late calves.”
“I just assumed that was her car parked next to your truck. Since I didn’t see any luggage, I thought she must have gone out to the barn or something.”
West let out a bark of amusement. “Highly unlikely. I doubt she’d be caught anywhere near the barn, the animals or, honestly, this place.”
Marie eyed him over the top of her glasses and gave him a slow blink. The look that never failed to make him feel like he was that young foster kid getting into trouble for fighting at school again. “You don’t understand, West. Things may not be as you think they are, not exactly.”
“Whatever. Right now, I just want to deal with the princess and get her out of here so we can move on with life. She must be around here somewhere.” He left Harley to her dinner and headed to the front of the house, boots clomping on the hardwood floor. Chase and Ty followed closely behind him, for once not adding their own commentary.
He scanned the front rooms quickly, not seeing anything out of the ordinary. No suitcases, bags, or strangers lying about, poking their noses where they didn’t belong. He headed up the stairs to the second floor, pausing outside of Douglas’s closed door, a pang in his chest at the loss of his old mentor, the only father figure he had ever known. Would he always feel this pain when he passed the door?
“Do you think she’s in there?” Chase whispered loudly behind him, the sound echoing a bit in the open landing.
West scowled at him. “Nah, she must be in the guest room downstairs. We should have checked there first.”
They headed downstairs and down the hall to the room by Douglas’s office. Chase and Ty hung back while West turned the knob quietly. He stepped into the dim room, the one room Douglas had always kept them out of. He stepped farther into the room, his eyes adjusting to the low light but not before he stumbled over a bag just to the side of the door.
His low curse sounded and a noise from the bed drew his attention. A woman sat up from the bed looking rumpled and confused. “Who is it?”
Seemed he had just found his missing heiress.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

He wanted to be left in peace…

West Morgan knows all about second chances. After bouncing from foster home to foster home, he finally landed at the Rawlings Ranch as a teenager. There he found a home, something he’d never thought possible. Now an adult, he realizes he’s been given much more: a family and, most importantly, peace. But when his mentor dies and leaves the property divided among his foster brothers and his mentor’s daughter, Tara Rawlings, the fragile future he’s built for himself is threatened.

She wanted to be free of her past…

Tara Rawlings swore she’d never end up with someone like her father, a man completely focused on the ranch to the exclusion of his loved ones. She created a new life for herself in San Francisco, running an interior design company and getting married, then divorced. When she returns to settle her father’s estate, she finds that her birthright is in jeopardy. And the only way to save it is to work with West Morgan, the one man she has always resented—and always found irresistible.

Can they save the ranch without killing each other … or falling in love?

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Meet the Author:

Ever since Megan Ryder discovered Jude Deveraux and Judith McNaught while sneaking around the “forbidden” romance section of the library one day after school, she has been voraciously devouring romance novels of all types. Now a romance author in her own right, Megan pens sexy contemporary novels all about family and hot lovin’ with the boy next door. She lives in Connecticut, spending her days as a technical writer and her spare time divided between her addiction to knitting and reading.
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