Spotlight & Giveaway: The Wildest Ride 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 Wildest Ride!

 
Thank you! I’m so happy to be here!
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

I’m terrible at summarizing my own work (like, honestly, it make it sound the worst), but something my dear friend, Eileen Bobek of Rebel Heart Books, wrote about it recently blew me away. So, even though it’s cheating a bit, I wanted to share what she said:

“In The Wildest Ride, Lilian Sorrow Island is a twenty-seven-year old Muscogee Creek Freedmen and former junior Indian National Rodeo champion who is hellbent on holding onto her family’s Oklahoma ranch by winning the million dollar prize of the Professional Bull Riders Association. But one person stands in her way – her idol, the thirty-six-year old undefeated rodeo champion AJ Garza. Garza is determined to claim the same prize to save the soon-to-be bankrupt CityBoyz, the Houston youth rodeo program that turned his life around and put him on the path to greatness. Though their rivalry plays out in front of TV audiences, they both soon realize that there’s a lot more at stake than a million dollar prize. You may think you know who the cowboy is in this beautiful love story informed by the author’s own family history, but you’d be wrong.”

Please share the opening lines of this book:

On their own, the sheep weren’t that bad. It was the goats that were the problem. They gave the sheep ideas.

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

I go through many stages in the writing process and at a few of them, I love listening to music while I’m working. Because of that, I make a unique playlist for each book (public on Spotify if anyone wants to check it out). I’m always shocked by how the list captures the tone and emotions of the story by the time both are done. Usually one song emerges as a kind of theme song for the story, too, and for The Wildest Ride, that’s Tornado by Little Big Town (but is Lil the tornado… or is it love? You’ll just have to read to find out!).

Other fun facts:
One thing I get a kick out of, is that the heroine’s full name, Lilian Sorrow Island, comes from my family tree–including SORROW! When I found out I had an ancestor named Sorrow as a child I was flabbergasted and to have it come full circle and be a part of my book decades later was really fun. Another thing that is silly and random is that my character inspiration for the banker who shows up in the first chapter is the llama that works for the bank (Judith) from the animated movie Sing (my daughter loved it so we watched that movie A LOT at my house).

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

As I’m relatively new in my career as an author, I am constantly learning about how it all works. One of the things that has surprised me is how confronting every character is. Each one is someone I have created and I love them, but because they come from inside of me they ultimately become very revealing. While I’m doing my best to capture the their drives, fears, and ideas, I can’t help but see that those often parallel with lessons I’ve have to learn or things I’m still struggling with. When Lil gets stubborn and starts to hold herself back from happiness because she’s afraid, I am forced to acknowledge that I do the same thing. And, darn it, because I’m the one doing the outing, there’s nobody I can call a liar. But if they’re confronting, they’re pleasantly surprising, too! AJ turned out to be less of a playboy than I thought he was when everything started out. As the story unfolded, it became clearer and clearer that the whole reason he and Lil worked together was because she was the first thing outside of rodeo that he ever saw as worthy of any kind of pursuit. I realized that he wasn’t so much a playboy as not one to look a gift horse in the mouth *wink, wink*.

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

I’d do each of their opening scenes, hands down.

Lil cares about family, ranching, and rodeo–in that order, and that comes through as she transitions from rounding up the lost sheep to rescuing her grandmother from evil bankers without a hitch.

AJ is carefree but just as dedicated to those he loves as Lil is, which shows in the way he’s willing to laugh at himself when he’s in the gym, but unwilling to back down on helping out.

If a performer captured those core character traits, I think they’d have Lil and AJ down pretty well. (Also, the settings of both of those scenes, the ranch and the gym, really show their roots).

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

It feels dramatic to say, but remains true nonetheless: reading saved my life. Reading has always and continues to provide me with a mental refuge in a world that has always been pretty full-on. Because reading has always been a safe space for me when I’ve needed one most, my greatest hope as an author is to give that to someone else. So, first and foremost, my hope is that *it* takes readers away, More specifically, I hope that The Wildest Ride takes readers to a vision of the west that is colorful, dynamic, and real (for all that its features reality TV!).

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

I’m currently working on revisions of the follow-up to The Wildest Ride, which will be called The Rodeo Queen and is scheduled to come out in July of 2022. It’s so exciting to be back in the world of the Closed Circuit and in the hearts and minds of characters that readers will meet in The Wildest Ride. I am doubly fortunate as an author, in that I also write for the Harlequin Presents line, so as soon as I wrap up revisions, I’ll jump into working on my current Presents-in-Progress. Between The Wildest Ride, which is out August 10, 2021, and my next Presents, Pregnant After One Forbidden Night (October 2021), I’ve got a busy rest of the year!
 
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: One copy of Stolen to Wear His Crown, one copy of His Stolen Innocent’s Vow, and one copy of The Wildest Ride (all signed). Open to US residents only.

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: What makes someone a cowboy?

 
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Excerpt from The Wildest Ride:

“We’re not sleeping like that.” Lil was proud of how steady and no-nonsense her voice came out. It certainly didn’t match anything going on inside.
The fool had gone and zipped their sleeping bags together.
She stood beside him, staring down at the bags.
Without turning to her, he said, “We are. Heat is the only chance you have to recover in time for tomorrow. Our only chance at a decent score.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Right…”
His head whipped around and he pinned her with a look that set off the roller coaster she’d been riding since they’d started the challenge. The man was too much.
With an all-too-sensual curve in his lips, he said, “There won’t be any games when I get you in bed.”
And then she was blushing again and thinking about their kiss again, and the night in her RV, and wanting more. Her throat felt thick and heavy, her nipples hard and sensitive.
And here he was trying to share a sleeping bag.
The man was insane. Honestly.
“No way,” she repeated, her voice catching in her dry throat.
“We lost a lot of time today. You need to be at your best tomorrow if we’re going to make it up. That means warm.”
He wasn’t playing fair. It was like he was inside her, as if he knew exactly what buttons to push to secure her compliance. The one-two punch of guilt and cold competition wormed into her, working its magic until her resistance crumbled. It was completely reasonable to sleep together in the name of the competition. Rational even.
“Fine. Clothes stay on.”
He called her a prude and her laugh bubbled out without her permission. It was hard to hold on to stern around him.
The laughter broke the tension of the moment, or at least that’s what Lil told herself as she lowered herself to the ground. One of the sponsors had provided the contestants with long johns, and AJ tossed her hers. She slipped into the now-oversized sleeping bag and wiggled out of her jeans and into the long johns.
AJ just took his jeans off where he stood and Lil’s mouth went dry as she watched, knowing her eyes should be on anything else but him. He wore boxer briefs, cotton and plain- colored, just like the T-shirts he preferred. His well-muscled thighs were golden brown and smooth and she pictured running her tongue up the length of one toward the part of him so clearly outlined by the fit of her his boxers.
“My eyes are up here, Lilian.”

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

“Filled with deep emotion and intense spark, Marcella Bell brings grit, spark and brilliance to western romance! Marcella Bell is one to watch!”—Maisey Yates, New York Times bestselling author

The world watches on as reality TV meets rodeo in this competition like no other. In front of the cameras, Lil and AJ are each other’s biggest rivals. Off-screen, it’s about to get a whole lot more complicated…

At thirty-six, undefeated rodeo champion AJ Garza is supposed to be retiring, not chasing after an all-new closed-circuit rodeo tour with a million-dollar prize. But with the Houston rodeo program that saved him as a wayward teen on the brink of bankruptcy, he’ll compete. And he’ll win.

Enter Lilian Sorrow Island. Raised by her grandparents on the family ranch in Muskogee, Oklahoma, Lil is more a cowboy than city boy AJ will ever be. It shows. She’s not about to let him steal the prize that’ll save her ranch, even if he is breathtakingly magnificent, in pretty much every way going…

This summer, in this bold, uplifting novel, Marcella Bell reminds us that even when it comes to rodeo, romance is the wildest ride of all!

A Closed Circuit Novel

Book Links: Amazon | B&N | iTunes | 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 and daydreamed about throughout her life. To reach out, keep up, or check-in, visit www.marcellabell.com
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