Spotlight & Giveaway: Society Girl by Alys Murray

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Alys Murray to HJ!

Hi Alys and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, Society Girl!

 
Hi, all of you Harlequin Junkies. I’m so excited to be chatting with you!
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

Society Girl is a romance about Samantha Dubarry, who finds out that her long-lost father is actually a British Duke. Because she’s spent most of her life on her own, she wants to win his approval, so she attempts to become the first female member of this elite, secret society at Oxford University, the same secret society that he was apart of when he was in school. But the final test of her initiation is to make one of her family’s staff members fall in love with her…and then break his heart.

But Daniel Best, her father’s driver and a singer-songwriter in his free time, is a total romantic. And soon, his sweet music and kind eyes and impossibly sexy touch has her wondering if maybe she needs the society after all…
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

“I just don’t understand why you’re so hell-bent on
convincing me you don’t have a heart.”

That caught her. With a rueful shake of her head, she
patted his shoulder and moved for the door. “Oh, Daniel.”

“What?”

She hesitated in the shadows. “You’re the only thing
convincing me that I do have one.”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• The book was originally titled, “Love Songs for Cynics,” because Daniel brings music and love into Sam’s cynical world.
• On a research trip to Oxford, I got run off by security because I didn’t realize that you had to pay to visit the colleges! Yes, my visit to Trinity College got cut short when a security officer literally started chasing me off of the grounds and out of the gates!
• In the book, I mention that Samantha and her older brother, Thomas, make up for lost time after years of growing up apart by taking two separate trips to Disneyworld. When I was writing this book, I actually wrote two short stories about those trips. (Thomas gets mistaken for a Disney prince in one of them; in another, they get stuck on It’s a Small World, of course!)

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

At first, Samantha is attracted to Daniel because, in her high society world, she’s completely surrounded by fake people who do everything they can to try and hide themselves from the world. They do performances of themselves rather than just being themselves. But Daniel is absolutely, 100% authentic…And she ends up loving every bit of his nerdy, honest, romantic, creative, hard-working, sexy self.

Daniel is attracted to Samantha because she really sees him. He’s spent most of his life struggling in the lower classes of Oxford society, and his music career is mostly filled with empty bar rooms of people who didn’t show up to hear him play or sing. He’s used to being invisible, but Samantha really sees him. And, in turn, he really sees her, past the mask she wears to impress her family’s rich friends and family.

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

The scene where Samantha hears the song Daniel wrote for her for the first time was actually the first scene I wrote. Every time I read it again, I blush a little bit because it’s just So Sweet. Samantha is a person who spent most of her life being neglected, and for her to finally have a little bit of good in her life…Oh, it gives me all the feels!

“He wrote me a song, Sam could have cried. He wrote
me a song. No matter how many times she repeated the
sentence, it didn’t make entirely perfect sense to her. She
was going to deal him an incredible cruelty and he…he…
He wrote her a song. A love song. His beautiful love song
whispered long-rejected truths straight to her broken soul.

And for the first time in her life, Sam wanted to believe
them. It actually hurt, how much her heart longed to listen.

Taking on a life of its own, the song grew into a beam
of light. It wrapped itself around her and tugged, pulling
her straight toward him. They were magnets. She was drawn
to him, entranced and under his spell. Her feet carried her
through the crowd, straight up to the foot of the stage.
She couldn’t stop walking any more than she could stop
breathing. The longer she walked, the closer to him she got,
the more the world around her disappeared. Piece by piece,
brick by brick, her universe collapsed until there was only
Daniel and his song.”

Readers should read this book….

if they love 10 Things I Hate About You, What a Girl Wants, Guys and Dolls, Downton Abbey, Dogfight, Christian and Satine from Moulin Rouge, gender-bent classics, rockstar heroes, Beta Heroes, stories about romance defeating the patriarchy, stories about falling in love during a bet, the feeling you get when you listen to “All You Need is Love” or “Somebody to Love” at full volume.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

I’m currently working on a royalty romance series set in the U.K., and currently have two books out on submission: one that’s Pride and Prejudice-inspired and set a flower farm called Full Bloom, and another one called Public Image, that follows a plus-sized comic book expert as she tries to train a serious Shakespearean actor for his role in a superhero movie.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: A copy of Society Girl and a postcard from Oxford University, signed by the author, for you to use as a bookmark!

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: One of the things that helps Samantha believe in love in Society Girl is the way Daniel sings for her. If someone wanted you to fall in love with them, what one song would they have to sing to you in order to make you go completely head-over-heels in love with them?

 
a Rafflecopter giveaway

 
 

Excerpt from Society Girl:

The following excerpt comes during one of Samantha’s initiation rituals into The Animos Society. She’s forced to go out onto one of the college lawns, in only her underwear, and stand there all night. Daniel finds her, and sparks fly between them…

The darkened shop windows and chanting lads passed him
by carelessly until he walked into the vast yard of Christ
Church. Christ Church was one of his favorites, a massive
cathedral whose reverence was undercut by the flock of
longhorn cattle who freely grazed upon their vast green
lands.
It was a popular cut-through for people trying to get
home after a long night out. The perfect place to sell his
songs.
But tonight wasn’t like usual, with a few random kids
strolling through or stopping to smoke their cigarettes
before they got home to annoyed roommates. There, on
the edge of the pavement so as to observe the “DO NOT
STEP ON THE GRASS” sign, was a woman. An almost naked woman. She stood in the cold without moving, not
even tilting her head at the small crowd assembled around
her. Even from halfway across the yard, Daniel could hear
the barbs on their slurring tongues. Words and insults he
wouldn’t sling at his worst enemy.
Instinct forced him to act.
“Hey!” he bellowed.
Power he didn’t know he possessed rippled and radiated
from deep inside of him. Like a pack of synchronous
flamingos, the taunting party stared in his direction,
blinking stupidly as he approached.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Spooked, the crowd dispersed, but the head of the halfnaked woman in front of Christ Church didn’t move. She
might as well have been a statue. Even when he spoke, she
didn’t give him any attention.
“Miss, are you all right?” he called, approaching her,
reaching out a friendly hand in surrender.
Then he realized who he was talking to. This was not
performance art. This was not a spectacle. It was the woman
from the house.
It took a moment—no, longer than a moment—to fully
comprehend what it was he had walked into here. In the
middle of a cold winter’s night, the daughter of a duke stood
in front of Christ Church in her knickers, covered in angry
and disgusting black marker scribblings that would have put
the devil to shame.
And she was almost crying. Her body trembled. Her
knees knocked. The skin around her lower lip was white
with the force of her own biting down on it. Her eyes
brimmed with tears she refused to shed.
His heart bled for her, but everything about her told
him it would be worse to let her know how deeply he pitied
her. In spite of her bare flesh and the insults written on it,
she held her shoulders back and her chin up. The closeness
of her tears didn’t affect the steady, commanding tone of
her voice.
“I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she snarled. Her clenched hands trembled at her
side. It had to be from the force it took to keep them there,
instead of folded across her chest… Her lace-covered chest
that took every ounce of Daniel’s willpower to keep from
ogling. Her tone softened slightly. “Thank you.”
“What are you doing?”
“Read the sign. Then go away.”
He glanced at the folded cardboard with scribblings on
it. The insignia, he recognized, but the words written on it
meant nothing to him. “What does it mean?”
“It’s an initiation thing,” she supplied.
He didn’t miss how fast she was blinking back tears.
“I didn’t know Animos took in women.” Mild surprise
colored him. Even without the insignia-stamped sign, this
had all the makings of an Animos initiation. Nudity. Public
humiliation. The swirling specter of possible accidental
death by hypothermia. He’d never seen a woman involved
before. Not as a candidate, anyway.
“They don’t. But they will.” For the first time, her voice
tilted up. She was past crying. Daniel counted it as a small
victory for himself. Maybe it meant she trusted him, even if
only a little bit. “What are you doing here?”
The guitar case slid off of his back. With great care, he set
it on down on the stone pathway, snapping open the latches
to reveal the instrument to the stars. He did everything as
matter of fact as he could. He’d be damned if he left her out
here to the wolves, but he’d be even more damned if she
realized he was trying to protect her. She didn’t seem the
type to want pity.
“I came out here to play.” The body of his guitar lay
against him like a shield. Once it was in place, he extended
his hand, careful to keep his eyes on hers and nowhere else
on her body. “I’m Daniel, by the way. Daniel Best.”
He’d been right about her eyes. Arresting. The ends of
her lips twitched upward in the softest hint of a smile.
“Sam Dubarry.”
Removing his hand from hers, he shook it out to rid
himself of the tingles she zapped through him.
“Dubarry.” He directed the conversation as smoothly as
he could, scraping his internal movie catalogue for some hint
of what to do. What would Leo DiCaprio, James Cagney,
or Jimmy Stewart do if he were standing here instead of
Daniel? “You must know my boss. Thomas the…I don’t
know, seventy-eighth?”
She rewarded his joke with a chuckle. It broke the
silence of the greens like a tinkling of wind chimes.
“He’s my dad,” she admitted.
Daniel searched his pockets for a pick. Always the most
difficult part of getting ready to play, it at least afforded him
some cover of casualness.
“The rumors are true, then.”
“What rumors?”
“The rumors that Old Man Dubarry has a beautiful
daughter.”
A breath of silence. She ducked her head.
“No one called me beautiful.”
“You have sisters?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then they must have been talking about you.”

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

Sam Dubarry is a cynic. Growing up in the foster system in NYC does that to you. And falling in love is by far the stupidest thing you could do in her opinion.

But there’s one thing she craves more than anything—family. The illegitimate American daughter of an English Lord, Sam is desperate to make her father take notice of her. Which is where the Animos Society comes in.

The exclusive Oxford University club is her family’s legacy—and full of the worst kind of rich men. But becoming the first female member will take everything she has. Maybe more.

Daniel Best is the one man who truly sees Sam. The real her. The new mechanic for her father, Daniel is everything the Animos’ aren’t. Kind, honorable, good. But then the worst thing she can imagine happens…

The Society will let her in, if she destroys the one person she might be falling in love with first.
 
 

Meet the Author:

lys Murray is an author who writes for the romantic in all of us. Though she graduated with a degree in Drama from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and a Master’s in Film Studies from King’s College London, her irrepressible love of romance led her to a career as an author and screenwriter, and she couldn’t be happier to write these stories!

Alys loves connecting with readers, so if you want to get in touch, you can find her at http://www.alysmurray.com or on twitter at @writeralys.

Currently splitting time between her home state of Louisiana and London, she enjoys kissing books, Star Wars, and traveling. Tobey Maguire is her Spider-Man.
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