As I’ve said before, I didn’t intend for Give the Lady a Ride to be a series. I’ll be taking a course on creating a series at the ACFW Conference this August, but for now, I just had to wing it. One of the first things I learned is to treat the first in the series like backstory, providing only what is needed to help a new reader become oriented in the story. The next thing I learned is that I’m pretty good at winging it. I love how The Final Ride came out!

Stories must have conflict, and since my two main characters, Patricia Talbert and Talon Carlson, fell in love in the last book, I decided to bring someone new in to mix things up a bit.

Meet Adele Cameron.

Adele is Patricia’s aunt — her mother Natalie’s older sister. Now it goes like this: Patricia’s dad, Don — brother to Jake McAllister who originally owned the Circle Bar ranch with his wife, Loretta — was raised on a Texas ranch (not the Circle Bar — but that’s a whole other story). When Don grew up, he rejected the ranch life in favor of pursuing a white collar job in business. By the time Natalie met him, he was a successful business man with an eye for politics. He fell for Nat, married her, and moved back to her home state of New York. Now he’s a US Senator from the state of New York — which suits Adele’s blue blood just fine.

Adele is a snob. A certified, tilt-nose, everything-from-Texas-is-vulgar snob. At least Don had the good sense to leave the god-forsaken state and live a more sophisticated life, bouncing between NYC and DC. But now his daughter has fallen in love with — gasp! — a rodeo man!

Basically, Adele has no room to talk. It’s not like she’s lived in a penthouse suite all her life. At one point, she was married to a rich racehorse breeder and lived on his ranch in Kentucky. Another time, she was married to a man (also rich) who lived quietly in his (massive) cabin in the Appalachians. In fact, she’s been married many times — all resulting in her becoming divorced or widowed. Still, she’d never stoop so low as to marry a bull rider.

So she’s on a mission: Bring Patricia back home to New York.

She has many tricks up her sleeve, not the least of which is her secret weapon and personal chef, Gregory Curry.

But I go too far. You’ll have to read the book to see how a New York Chef fits on a Texas ranch.