Spotlight & Giveaway: Bride for a Day by Carolyn Brown

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Carolyn Brown to HJ!

Hi Carolyn and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, Bride for a Day!

 
Good morning to all y’all, and thank you, Sara, for inviting me back to HJ again! I always enjoy my visits here.
 

Please summarize the book a la Twitter style for the readers here:

Cassie didn’t want to be a bride, not even for one day, but she didn’t have much choice. Ted sure didn’t want to be married, but that was the first thing that came to his mind when the red haired woman asked for his help.
 

Please share the opening lines of this book:

Cassie frowned at her reflection in the cracked mirror above the lavatory in the women’s rest room. She wanted to blend in with the folks in the convenience store and café combination, but since she was almost six feet tall and had red hair, that was near impossible.
“I need a scarf or a hat to cover up this tell-tale red hair.” She pulled a brush through the tangled red curls that framed her oval face. “I should just slap a sign on my backpack that says Return Me To to Cecil Gorman.”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• Cassie didn’t want to be married, but she was, and to a man she didn’t even know.
• Ted sure didn’t want to be married, but he was, and she was sure cute when she was angry.
• Telling his big family what he’d done wasn’t going to be easy.
• The family didn’t respond the way he thought, and neither did Cassie.

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

Ted has a big heart, but it’s never been the same since his twin brother died. Cassie could see that in his eyes. For once Ted could be a knight-in-shining armor, and save the damsel in distress, but he sure didn’t think it would take them to the court house to get married.
 

Using just 5 words, how would you describe Hero and Heroine’s love affair?

Rocky, unexpected, rockier, rockiest and acceptance.
 

The First Kiss…

Just a snippet. They’ve just gotten married and don’t even know each other:
Ted looked down into Cassie’s green eyes. He drew her close to him, tipped her chin back with his hand, and kissed her hard enough to convince that fool sheriff, —and was surprised when Cassie kissed him back. He felt a surge of electricity course through him and thought that it was surely nothing more than relief that the charade was over.
“Okay. She can consider herself kissed,” Sheriff Tucker said. “Tommy, let’s lead the way over to the motel in Nocona and give them the keys to their honeymoon room. I called my sister while we were waiting for you, and she said she’s putting you right next to the ice machine. That way if you want to run out and get some champagne,”— Bud winked, —“or maybe just beer, you won’t have to go far to find ice for them.”
Ted wondered if the sheriff had yet another relative who owned the local liquor store but decided not to ask.

Without revealing too much, what is your favorite scene in the book?

Here it is! My favorite scene in the book. I loved writing this one:

She walked up the lane, enjoying every minute of the sounds of the birds and the smell of the fresh morning air. She was stepping out on the paved road going toward town when she heard the sound of a truck’s engine on the gravel. She turned to see Ted’s truck throwing a spray of dust behind it. When it came to a screeching stop, gravel flew out against the trees lining the lane.
Ted rolled down the window and said, “I told you I would take you to work. You can’t walk that far on a highway.”
“This isn’t a highway; it’s Washington Street,” she snapped at him, “and you don’t own me, Ted Wellman. I can do whatever I want, and this morning I want to walk to work.”
“When you are out this far, it turns into Highway 32,” he informed her. “Are you still mad at me over the argument we had about building a house?”
“No, I just wanted to walk and clear my head,” she answered. “Go on back to the house and work your cattle. I’m not helpless. I’ve got two legs that haven’t been getting enough exercise, and I am walking.”
“And have Mama yell at me for not taking you?” Ted asked. “No thank you.”
“Are you saying I’m causing trouble between you and your family?” Cassie asked.
“If you continue to walk, you could be,” he answered.
“Then so be it,” Cassie said. “I’m tired of depending on someone to take me and bring me home.”
“Well, darlin’,” he dragged out the endearment into several syllables, “I’m driving you to work if I have to hog-tie you and deliver you over my shoulder like a sack of cattle feed. Mama told me to get over myself and move on. You told me the same thing. The two of you even had red placemats on the table this morning, and she knows that red reminds me of my brother covered in blood.”
“That’s your problem,” Cassie said.
“Okay, you asked for it.” He got out of his truck and grabbed a length of rope from the back seat.
“You wouldn’t dare.” She glared at him for a minute, then turned around and started walking again. After fighting with him, she would have to walk fast or she would be late, so she added a little speed. She might look like the wrath of God when she made it to the clinic but she was not getting into that truck. It was a matter of pride now, and she intended to win.
Ted’s rope floated out of the air like a halo and lassoed her, pinning her arms to her sides. Before she could take another step, think another thought, or even say a cuss word, he had looped it around her three times and tied it in a knot. He threw her over his shoulder.
“Put me down right now,” she demanded.
“I told you I was taking you to work,” he said as he opened the passenger side of the truck and plopped Cassie down on the front seat.
“Untie me,” she yelled at him. “I will go peacefully if you’ll just take this rope away.”
“I’m not taking any chances. There’s a couple of stop signs between here and there, and you might jump out just to prove a point,” he told her.
“You are evil and mean, and I don’t like you.” If his folks wanted emotion from him, well, then, she had just given them a bushel basket full.
“You are stubborn, willful, and sometimes I don’t like you either,” he informed her, but he did not untie her.
A few minutes later he parked the pickup in front of the clinic, took his time walking around the truck, opened the passenger door slowly, and scooped Cassie up like she was a bride—like he had done that night at the motel after they’d gotten married.
“You put me down right now and untie me,” she fumed.
“I’ll put you down inside the clinic, just like I said I’d do,” Ted said without a hint of a smile on his sexy face.
He managed to open the door, carry Cassie inside, and set her down in the lobby in front of the Gloria, the office manager, whose eyes were the size of saucers.
To add insult to injury, that same nasty woman—Patsy—who had gossiped about the Wellmans in the uniform shop was sitting in the waiting room.
Ted untied Cassie, held her arms down to her sides so she couldn’t slap him, and before she could say a word, he tipped up her chin and kissed her.
She was stunned speechless at the kiss, but more so that she had wrapped her arms around him and kissed him back. Even as she was enjoying the kiss, she told herself it was just to show Patsy that they were settling a lover’s quarrel.
“Have a good day, Mrs. Wellman,” he said as he walked out of the clinic with the rope draped over his shoulder.
“Well, well, well.” Gloria giggled. “That’s a story we’ll have to talk about over lunch.”
Cassie could hear him whistling all the way to his truck. Add another item to that bushel of emotions, she thought, as she put her purse away.
“So?” Gloria asked. “I’ll treat for the story.”
“You buy. I’ll talk,” Cassie told her.

If your book was optioned for a movie, what scene would be absolutely crucial to include?

Ted slowly made his way up the stairs for the first time since his wreck. He headed to John’s room, but he couldn’t make himself open the door. He just stood there, staring at the knob with something that felt like a cold chunk of ice in his gut.
Finally, after several minutes, he put his hand on the knob and peeked inside. He remembered when he had moved into a room down the hallway that had one bed in it. His mother and his sister, Liz, had moved all his clothing to the new room and closed the door. Everything in the room was covered with dust, but then it had been more than four years since the door had been closed.
“I’m sorry, brotherBrother. It wasn’t right to shut you up in this room, and not let you go,” Ted muttered.
Two twin beds were separated by a nightstand holding a dusty lamp shaped like a football. Newspaper articles about the calves they’d shown at the county fair, football games they’d played in junior high, and their favorite pin-up of a movie star, were all still thumbtacked to a huge bulletin board on the other side of the room. A tall chest of drawers and a double dresser sat against another wall.
A box was sitting on John’s bed, and Ted eased down beside it. The pictures that had been strewn across his dresser were tucked away in the box. His mother must have planned to clean out the room at one time, but she couldn’t bear to do it.
“That wasn’t fair to her,” he muttered as he looked through them.
She was trying to protect you. John’s voice was back, stronger this time than ever. It wasn’t that she didn’t love me, but she didn’t want the pictures to be a constant reminder to you.
He Ted pulled out one picture after another and laid them on the bed—photos of the twins when they had first walked, when they played T-ball, when Clayton first let them drive the tractor—sixteen years of happy life in one big cardboard box.
Ted picked up the last photo taken of him and John. The blinds of the room were still drawn, and it was difficult to make out their faces, but they were standing in front of a tractor. He remembered it being the end of the day after they had had a race to see who could plow the most ground in eight hours. It had been a tie. Two weeks later, John was dead.
Ted studied it for a moment and put the picture back in the box. It was time to put them all back on the dresser and put the room to rights. He needed to remember the happy times he had had with his brother, not keep John shut up in a room as if he had never lived.
Ted picked up a baseball bat and took a short swing at an imaginary ball. Last time he’d been in this room, his brother had still been very much alive.
“Am I crazy?” he asked.
No, but if you don’t move on, you will be.
“Ted?” Cassie peeked into the room.
“Lord, you scared me. I heard you walking around but I didn’t know if it was you or a ghost in here,” she said.
“This was our room before John died,” he said. “I moved out that very night, and I’ve never been back in here until right now.”
“Can I come inside, or would you rather do this alone?”
“I would love for you to come in with me.” Ted nodded. “Will you help me take care of something I should have done years ago.”?”
Cassie took his hand and gave it a squeeze.
“Cassie, I want to put these pictures back on the dresser. John needs to be visible, not tucked away in a box,” Ted said.
“Then we’re going to have to clean this room. John’s memory doesn’t need to live in a room that smells like stale air and dust mites. I’m glad you are ready to do this, but maybe you better set them up. I wouldn’t know the order you had them in.”
“Probably so,” Ted said.
“But first we dust and vacuum, and get rid of all the cobwebs,” Cassie said.
“Kind of symbolic of all the years I’ve let dust accumulate on my heart,” Ted said.
“Yep, it is,” she said. “I can help clean the room, but the business with your heart belongs to you.”
“Oh, no!” Ted told her. “I wouldn’t be where I am today if you hadn’t coerced me into marrying you,” he teased.
“Seems like I remember it was you that came up with that brilliant idea,” Cassie reminded him.

Readers should read this book …

because it proves that sometimes love can be found in the strangest places and when least expected.

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

I just finished a women’s fiction book, and am starting to work on an audible original novel titled Finding Dreams.
I’ve got an audible original coming out this spring, plus an anthology, In Bloom, with Fern Michaels and Lori Foster (April 26), a women’s fiction, Riverbend Reunion (June 14) and The Sandcastle Hurricane (Nov. 8) and a couple of reissued cowboys thrown in between those.

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

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Excerpt from Bride for a Day:

Cassie frowned at her reflection in the cracked mirror above the lavatory in the women’s rest room. She wanted to blend in with the folks in the convenience store and café combination, but since she was almost six feet tall and had red hair, that was near impossible.
“I need a scarf or a hat to cover up this tell-tale red hair.” She pulled a brush through the tangled red curls that framed her oval face. “I should just slap a sign on my backpack that says Return Me To to Cecil Gorman.” She pulled her hair up into a ponytail, wrapped a rubber band around it twice, and hoped it was time for the bus to leave. She only had to walk down one aisle, past half a dozen booths, and out the door without running into the two policemen who had come into the place right after the passengers all piled off the bus.
In a few minutes, folks would begin to reboard the bus. In less than an hour, she’d be across the Texas state line and into Oklahoma. Not that it mattered which state she was in if Cecil wanted to come looking for her. When Deana died, he had told her Cassie she had a choice—she could either get out of his house or do what he told her. She had no money, and had taken care of Deana, his wife, for two more than three years after she’d graduated from high schoolyears. She had no place to go. Her mother had died before her sixteenth birthday. She had no job because Cecil had insisted that she give up her college scholarship and take care of Deana when she got lung cancer.
What Cecil told her meant she was being sold to a man who ran a sex trafficking ring out of Houston. He must have thought he gave her no way out, but she had taken the wedding rings her grandmother had left to her, pawned them, and bought a bus ticket to Oklahoma City—t. That was as far as she could get away from Cecil on the amount of money the pawn broker would givegave her.
If the authorities said she had to go back to Cecil’s place out in West Texas, they could just put her body in a pine box, because she would never go back, not if she was still breathing. Her life would end right there in LindseyLindsay, Texas, at a convenience store at the age of twenty. She would rather be dead as than sold into the sex trafficking ring that Cecil had already gotten half payment for. She just needed a place to hide out for a little while. Hopefully, he would get tired of looking for her, and she would never see him again.
“Send me some luck, Mama,” she whispered. “I don’t even mind living in a trailer again. Living there was better than living in that house with Cecil anyway.”
He was a long-distance truck driver, and things weren’t so bad when he was out on the road for a week or more at a time. But when he came home for a day or two, everything was tense and even Deana acted different. Those days, except for cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the outside animals, she stayed in her tiny room.
She couldn’t stay in the bathroom another minute if she planned to reboard the bus. She took a deep breath and looked at her reflection in the dirty mirror one more time. “I look like you, Mama,” she whispered.
Her mother had worked as a waitress at a diner out in the middle of nowhere in a little community called Maryneal. She brought home enough money to pay the bills, and Cassie had grumbled about having to ride the bus twenty miles morning and evening to the nearest high school.
“I’m sorry, Mama.” Cassie wiped a tear from her mossy- green eyes with the back of her hand. “If I knew then what I do now,” she muttered, “I would never have said a word.”
Her mother must have known something wasn’t right a few weeks before the aneurism aneurysm burst in her head, because she’d handwritten a will, leaving her few meagre meager possessions to her daughter including the wedding rings that Cassie had pawned for money. There was a personal letter to Cassie telling her that in the event of her mother’s death, arrangements had been made for her to live with the other waitress, Deana, and her husband, Cecil.
Everything changed in Cassie’s life after that.
“I miss you so much,” Cassie said. “Send down a miracle and help me stay away from Cecil for a few months, just until I can claim my inheritance, and if possible, could you help me find a job when I get to Oklahoma City. ? If you were here, you’d shoot him yourself for selling me like I was nothing more than one of Deana’s goats.”
The heavy rock that she seemed to carry in her heart from the day that she and Deana scattered her mother’s ashes, got even bigger two days after she had graduated from high school. That was the day they found out Deana had terminal cancer. Cecil laid a heavy guilt trip on Cassie.
“You’ve studied that nurses’ aide stuff at the vo-tech these past two years while you were in high school, and you owe us for taking you in so that you didn’t have to go to foster care in some gawd-awful place. You can pay us back by taking care of Deana while I’m out on the road making a living to put food in your mouth and pay the bills to keep a roof over your head,” he had said.
“But I’m enrolled in college this fall. I’ve got a full scholarship to finish studying to be a nurse.” She remembered tears flowing down her cheeks.
“You owe us, girl,” Cecil growled. “And besides, you are still just seventeen. I can call Social Services and turn you over to them. You want to go to foster care?”
“Please,” Deana had begged. “I don’t want someone I don’t know coming in here to take care of me.”
Cassie couldn’t say no to Deana, but she’d cried herself to sleep for a week, and when college started that fall, she had cried for another week. Last week Deana had lost the battle with cancer, and Cecil came home to have her cremated. Cassie hoped that she might start to college as soon as the spring semester began, but the lady she talked to at the school said she would have to wait until fall when the new classes for nursing began.
“Last night was awful, Mama.” Cassie sighed and turned away from the mirror. “First he tried to force me into bed with him, and then he went into a rage when I fought him off. This morning he told me that he’d sold me to a man who runs a little sex trade. I had no money, so I had to hock Granny’s wedding rings. Why am I talking to you? You can’t help me.”
We always talk about everything, her mother’s voice whispered in her ear.
She Cassie took a deep breath, opened the bathroom door, and locked gazes with a uniformed policeman. He nudged the second one on the shoulder and nodded toward Cassie. They split up, but she could easily see they were trying to box her in. Her heart skipped two beats, fluttered a couple of times, then began to race. A fine sweat formed on her upper lip. The aroma of fried chicken wafted over to her, and her stomach growled. She’d love to walk right over to the deli and buy even just one chicken strip, but she couldn’t afford to spend her last few dollars on food.
She imagined the chill of the handcuffs around her wrists. She scanned the diner connected to the bus stop, but the exit door was on the other side of the policemen, who had not taken their eyes off her.
She considered dashing back into the restroom, and crawling out a window, but the only one in there was right up next to the ceiling. Evidently, her mother didn’t have a lot of power in heaven, because she hadn’t provided a miracle or sent any help.
Those who help themselves get help; h. Her mother’s words came to her mind.
That’s when Cassie saw a young man sitting alone in one of the booths. She smiled and waved when she caught his eye. Pretending she didn’t know there were two policemen between her and freedom, she forced her jelly-filled knees to carry her around the ends of the display shelves, past the potato chips that really looked good, and over to where he was sitting.
She slid into the booth across from the cowboy, and watched the bus pull away from the curb. The time had come to swim or drown, and she’d come too far now to have to throw in the towel. Hopefully, this man wasn’t a serial killer or married, or both—or worse yet, someone Cecil had sent to find her.
***
Ted Wellman had seen the redheaded woman when she came into the store with the rest of the folks who had gotten off the bus. She was a striking woman who carried herself like a runway model. He’d wondered why someone as beautiful as she was would take a bus rather than a plane. For several minutes after she disappeared into the ladies’ restroom, he tried to figure out what television show or movie he had seen her on, and finally came up with an answer. She’d been on a couple of episodes of Chuck, a series that he and his brother, John, had watched several times. A closer look her way told him that she wasn’t the character, Carina, so he went back to watching the people through the plate- glass window as he drank his coffee.
Then she came out of the restroom, locked eyes with him, and acted as if she knew him. Whoever she was, she was going to be embarrassed when she found out he didn’t have the first idea who she was or where he’d seen her before.
“Hi, honey,” she said, loudly enough for the two policemen behind her to hear. She reached across the table and laid a hand on his. “Please help me,” she whispered. “Please say I’m with you.”

Excerpts. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

In a modern love story between two strangers, New York Times bestselling author Carolyn Brown brings small town Texas to life with inimitable sass:

A young woman with a talent for trouble
An unplanned elopement leads to forever love
Irresistible attraction and sizzling chemistry
Characters that jump off the page
Hurting hearts are healed
Authentic Southern voice and setting
Cassie O’Malley is on the run. In a few months her inheritance will kick in. Until then, she just needs a job and a place to stay under the radar. But when Cassie gets off the bus in north Texas and runs smack into the town sheriff, she quickly does the first thing she can think of—approach the handsome stranger in the café and pretend to be a couple. Luckily, the sheriff believes it and the man surprisingly plays along—all the way up to the courthouse, where the officer insists on escorting them to get married.

Wondering how she got herself into this mess, Cassie can’t believe her plan got so far out of hand. Her new husband Ted assures her that his Uncle Ash, a lawyer, will get the whole thing straightened out with no problem. Cassie will only be a bride for a day, and then she can go on her way. But as his family welcomes her with full hearts, she begins to wonder if she’ll be able to say goodbye to Ted, or to the first loving family she’s known in her life.
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Meet the Author:

Carolyn Brown is a New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Publisher’s Weekly and #1 Amazon and #1 Washington Post bestselling author. She is the author of more than 100 novels and several novellas. She’s a recipient of the Bookseller’s Best Award, Montlake Romance’s prestigious Montlake Diamond Award, and also a three-time recipient of the National Reader’s Choice Award. Brown has been published for more than 20 years, and her books have been translated 21 foreign languages.
When she’s not writing, she likes to plot new stories in her backyard with her tom cat, Boots Randolph Terminator Outlaw, who protects the yard from all kinds of wicked varmints like crickets, locusts, and spiders. Visit her at www.carolynbrownbooks.com.
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