Spotlight & Giveaway: The Rodeo Queen by Marcella Bell

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Marcella Bell to HJ!

Hi Marcella and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, The Rodeo Queen!

 
It’s always great to be here! HJ is one of my favorites =^_^=!
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

I’m still so terrible at summarizing my work that I’m once again going to borrow from someone who did it better. This time it was the lovely folks at Publisher’s Weekly who described it with, “latina rodeo queen Sierra Quintanilla, the public face of Closed Circuit Rodeo, has worked hard to perfect her flawless persona of femininity and innocence for the audience. She’s convinced herself she’s happy and thriving—but a dance with “the devil,” Diablo Sosa, makes her realize just how much she’s missing. Black Latine Cowboy turned attorney Diablo walked away from the rodeo arena due to fatigue and frustration with rodeo culture’s whitewashed cowboy mythology. When his father figure, Henry “Old Man” Bowman, the owner of Cityboyz, an after-school program, asks him to compete on Closed Circuit to promote the program, however, Sosa does not hesitate. Sierra and Diablo could not be more different, but there’s no denying their attraction.”
 

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

“If she was a fool, then she would be one in private. To everybody else, she was going to look like the best damn rodeo queen the world had ever seen.”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

The sandwich Diablo shares with Sierra in New Orleans is real (be sure to pick one up the next time you’re in the French Quarter)!

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

The fact that she works so hard to be excellent–unlike the rest of the world, he can see through her facade of effortlessness and, rather than judge her negatively for it, finds her hard work, as well as the her beneath it all, admirable .

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

Diablo’s painful backstory has many pieces of real life stories I and people close to me have experienced, so pretty much all of his flashbacks were challenging for me to write, but the thing that got me the most (and that I wrote with tears in my eyes) were the voicemails Diablo’s grandmother leaves him–I can’t say more than that, though.

Readers should read this book….

when they need a sexy reminder that it’s always possible to change, accomplish, and thrive.

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

I am currently working on a Harlequin Presents that’s really giving me a hard time (perhaps because even I have a hard time imagining life as the world’s first gorgeously brooding trillionaire ~_^) as well as a young adult novel that will be less spicy but I hope no less emotional.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: A print copy of THE RODEO QUEEN by Marcella Bell

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: If you had to pick a theme for a rodeo queen look, what would it be?

 
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Excerpt from The Rodeo Queen:

But when she threw open her door, it wasn’t room service that greeted her.
It was Diablo Sosa.
Her heart thundered in her chest, panic gripping her throat. Coworkers, which he was at best, were not allowed to see the at-home version of Sierra.
As far as they were to know, the only Sierra that existed was Sierra Quintanilla, the quintessential rodeo queen.
She nearly slammed the door, her brain scrambling too late to stop or process the situation even as it took note of multiple details about him.
He was wearing a suit with clean, elegant lines, and a crisp white button-up, rather than the rodeo kit she’d last seen him in. The top three buttons of his shirt were open to reveal a vee of smooth deep brown skin, lightly dusted with short curling chest hairs.
Obviously, he had gone out after the show, and not to a rowdy bar, as she imagined the other contestants had. His suit was the quality and cut of someone who went to places that required them.
Closed Circuit contestants typically weren’t going to be the suit-up-after-the-show types, but she supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised Diablo was. He’d been wearing a suit when they’d met at the finale of the first season of The Closed Circuit.
Back then he had strolled over, liquid and rugged like a wild thing, wearing a white Stetson and a buttery-smooth black suit, a black button-up with a sheen to it and black snakeskin boots that hadn’t just been for show. They might have shone, but the supple creases said he’d broken them in.
He’d been utterly cowboy, but refined; the grit that was so obviously deep in his bones turned creamy and rich, smooth with age, like a pearl—and all of it wrapped up like a fancy candy bar.
He had sauntered over to her, the corner of his generous mouth lifting in a manner that had hooked straight into her
gut and encouraged her to make a fool out of herself right then and there by taking a step toward him. Something about him teased her, called to her and urged her to meet him in the middle when she had already given herself to rodeo.
His devil eyes had glinted with cocky awareness, as if her reaction was his due, filled with all of the entitled self-awareness that so many of the overly confident, incredibly handsome men she’d met in her life had.
So she’d decided to put him in his place.
Because she had to, for safety and sanity, and because if she didn’t know how to handle an overconfident cowboy, she wasn’t any kind of rodeo queen.
But just now, standing in her doorway, she wasn’t a rodeo queen and she wasn’t entirely certain she could handle him. She was in regular clothes, no shield of perfection, and his presence made her feel agitated and revealed.
What if he didn’t like what he saw?
The corner of his mouth lifted, pulling his full lips into a smile wicked enough to match his name, fitting the bill all the more for being framed by his perfectly groomed facial hair.
How was it possible for one man to suddenly take up all of the room in a grand hotel suite?
And why was his face so magnetic?
He didn’t have a full beard, but his crisply defined shadow emphasized the square cut of his jaw—and the model-like contours of his face. She was willing to bet he didn’t have to spend twenty minutes every morning to get that level of highlighted and shadowed dimension.
“I was in the neighborhood and couldn’t help but notice your door was unlocked,” he said after it became clear she was only going to stare. “But now that I’ve been awarded this rare sighting of Sierra Quintanilla in her natural state, I must admit, I have questions.”
The laughter in his voice and the cocky in his eye were finally enough to snap at least a little bit of sense into her, though.
Lifting an eyebrow, her perfectly shaped arch rising high over the rim of her glasses, she gave a nonchalant shrug and said, “Last I saw, this was a hotel, not a neighborhood.”
Bringing his hand to his chest, his eyebrows rising to his neat hairline, he said, “Now, what kind of thing to say to a neighbor is that? I come by full of honor and good intentions and you deny my very existence.”
And then that damn twinkle in his eye flashed again.
She snorted, not even registering that it was a sound rodeo queens didn’t make. “I’m flush out,” she said, bringing her hands to her hips, “neighbor,” she added.
“Between rodeo and Houston and the courtroom, I really thought I’d seen it all. But here I stand corrected because you ain’t seen nothin’ until you’ve seen Sierra Quintanilla in glasses.”

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

With more crowns to her name than hairs on her head, Sierra Quintanilla knows the rulebook inside out. And with Closed Circuit, the reality-TV-meets-rodeo-tour competition, back for a second season, she’s ready to play her part to perfection. But no one is actually perfect. And nothing is more dangerous to a rodeo queen than desire…

As a teenager, Diablo Sosa was sentenced by a judge to attend a Houston youth rodeo program. Now an attorney at law, Diablo spends his days seeking justice. He would never have returned to the arena but for his old mentor, so why does the pounding in his blood feel like a homecoming? Or perhaps that’s down to Sierra, the hostess, who shines brighter than the studio lights.

From Houston to New Orleans, from Miami to Las Vegas, Sierra and Diablo wrestle with a connection that could cost them everything—or else lead them right to where they’re meant to be…
Book Links: Amazon | B&N | kobo | Google |
 
 

Meet the Author:

Marcella Bell was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. She is a registered yoga teacher, an avid reader, a honeybee enthusiast, and a lover of travel, corvids, and karaoke. A wife, mother, and child of a multicultural household, Marcella is especially interested in writing novels that reflect her family history, as well as the people and places she’s known throughout her life.
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