Sunday, July 29, 2012

WYOMING WIFE?—a conversation with Jace and Samantha


Harlequin has reissued 16 of my backlist titles in ebook. Today I'm talking with Jace Tremayne and Samantha Burkett about WYOMING WIFE, a Silhouette Desire originally released in print November 1997 and currently available in ebook.


Hello Samantha and Jace. Welcome to my blog.

Jace:  Thanks for inviting us.

Samantha:  It's nice to be here.

Jace, you raise cattle in Wyoming on a ranch that has been in your family for several generations. Samantha, you were an efficiency expert working for a consulting firm in Los Angeles. That seems about as opposite as you can get. How in the world did the two of you meet?

Jace:  I was up in my helicopter checking the outlying areas of my ranch for damages and problems following the first wave of an early season snowstorm. The second wave was closing in on me and I had just made a wide turn to head back to the house and barn before the winds forced me down and I ended up stranded in the back pasture. That's when I spotted this car on the road stuck in a snowdrift.

Samantha:  Never in my life had I been so startled, frightened, and cold all at the same time. This helicopter suddenly appeared from out of nowhere and landed on the road. The pilot ran over to my car, threw me over his shoulder, then carried me back to his helicopter without saying a word. There I was…strapped into the seat with not even a door between me and the wild blue yonder, no winter coat and the icy cold wind cutting through my silk pants suit, and no idea where he was taking me.

What was someone from Los Angeles, inappropriately dressed for the place and weather, doing on a country road in Wyoming stuck in the snow?

Jace:  LOL. That was my exact question once we got back to the ranch house.

Samantha:  Well…(embarrassed chuckle) it was definitely not one of my finer moments. I had flown from Los Angeles to Denver to surprise my fiancé. It turned out that I was the one surprised when…uh…well, I caught him in bed with another woman. Needless to say, I was devastated over the betrayal. I started driving without any thought about where I was going and ended up lost and stuck in a snowdrift.

It sounds as if you were truly a fish out of water, so to speak. A big city girl living in Los Angeles with a corporate job who dresses in silk pantsuits suddenly on a cattle ranch in Wyoming in the middle of a blizzard. What in the world could the two of you possibly have found in common?

Samantha:  We obviously had nothing in common, yet I still felt this undeniable attraction to him. Not just his rugged good looks, either. I had never met anyone like him. Straight forward, confident, not feeling a need to impress others. He was comfortable and content with his life and his place in the order of things. Something I had never felt.

Jace:  (took her hand) Probably why you chose the career you did…a drive to be perfect in an imperfect world, to seek perfection in spite of the fact that no one is perfect.

So, while you were stranded together, how did you work out your differences?

Jace:  My live-in housekeeper/cook was away visiting her daughter. Her son is my ranch foreman. I had lost my…my wife had died a couple of years earlier and…well, Samantha did her best to help out but it immediately became obvious that in the kitchen anything more difficult than putting something in a microwave was out of her realm of expertise. I showed her how to gather eggs from the hen house, thinking it was a simple task anyone could handle, but it turned out that she was afraid of the chickens.

Samantha:  They had scary mean eyes! LOL It was truly a jolting experience to my sense of reality. As someone who thought she could accomplish anything by simply studying the problem and finding the most efficient solution, I ended up frustrated by everything around me.

What happened? Was there a specific incident for each of you? A moment in time when two people who seemingly had nothing in common realized that each was the person the other had been searching for? The one you wanted to spend the rest of my life with?

Jace:  A single moment?

Samantha:  A specific incident?

Jace/Samantha:  No, nothing like that.

LOL…well you both seem to agree on that. So what happened?

Jace:  You mean besides her disastrous attempts at making the type of hearty breakfast a rancher needs before spending the day working outdoors in a blizzard? Coffee…weak coffee, at that…and a slice of toast don't get the job done. (shoots sly grin at Samantha) We won't even go into what she did with dinner.

Surely there must have been moments where you found some common ground.

Samantha:  All things considered, he was extremely patient with my many blunders. Talk about being a fish out of water. Everything around me was so foreign to my life's experience. And the people…they were exactly what they appeared to be. No pretenses or phoniness. Emotionally, it frightened me. But other than some angry outbursts from Jace…which were totally justified…he was—

Jace:  (taking Samantha's hand) It's all in the book.

Samantha:  Exactly.

Thank you, Jace and Samantha, for joining me today.

***

WYOMING WIFE?, a Silhouette Desire by Shawna Delacorte reissued in ebook format. Available at http://ebooks.eharlequin.com/ (do search for author name Shawna Delacorte). Also available from Amazon for Kindle and Barnes & Noble for Nook.

Check my website for additional excerpts.  http://www.shawnadelacorte.com/

Blurb:

SNOWBOUND WITH A WYOMING COWBOY
Samantha Burkett knew microwave meals, rush-hour gridlock and men in three-piece suits. But an ill-fated trip to Wyoming in the midst of a blizzard set her reality on its ear….

Jace Tremayne had literally swooped down from the big sky to save her life. The rugged, tautly muscled rancher hadn't taken no for an answer, flinging her over his shoulder and flying her by copter to his remote ranch to wait out the worst of the storm. But close quarters with this irresistible cowboy showed Samantha how truly different their worlds were. And how completely Jace rocked hers….

But could she ever be content as this man's Wyoming wife?

Inside front cover excerpt:

"You do know that you'll have to stay here overnight, don't you? Maybe even longer."

Anxiety flitted around inside Samantha's stomach. It looked as if it would be just the two of them in the house.

"You seem to be uncomfortable," Jace added. "Let me assure you that you're perfectly safe—"

"Oh, no…it's not that."

Samantha stared at the flames in the fireplace. Exactly what was her problem? She had been totally unprepared for any of the things that had occurred since she left Los Angeles. And the biggest surprise of all was the way Jace Tremayne made her pulse race. It was inappropriate, very confusing…and very real. It was also totally absurd. He was a cowboy, a rugged outdoorsman—not at all the type of man who would fit in her world.

And a cattle ranch in Wyoming was certainly no place for her….
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Text Copyright © 1997 by SKDennison, Inc.  Cover Art Copyright © 1997 by Harlequin Enterprises Limited. Permission to reproduce text granted by Harlequin Books S.A. Cover art used by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises Limited. All rights reserved. ® and ™ are trademarks owned by Harlequin Enterprises Limited or its affiliated companies, used under license.

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