HAYWIRE BRIDES, #1
by
MARGARET BROWNLEY
Sub-genre: Western / Clean Romance
Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca
Date of Publication: September 4, 2018
Number of Pages: 384
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When Texas Ranger Brett Tucker accidentally derails a wedding, he's determined to bring the estranged couple back together...but he never dreamed he'd start falling for the bride!
Texas Ranger Brett Tucker hates to break up a wedding, but the groom—notorious criminal Frank Foster—is a danger to any woman. So he busts into the church, guns blazing...only to find he has the wrong man.
STOP THAT WEDDING!
Bride-to-be Kate Denver is appalled by her fiancé's over-the-top reaction to the innocent mistake and calls off the wedding—for good. Guilt-ridden, Brett's desperate to get them back on track. But the more time he spends with Kate, the harder he falls...and the more he yearns to prove that he's her true match in every way.
"Light and airy as cotton candy, this tale charms."
-- Publishers Weekly
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AMAZON BARNES & NOBLE iTUNES
For the Love of Candy
Save the Earth; it's the only planet
with chocolate
Guest Post by Margaret
Brownley
I’ve
got candy on my mind this month and it has nothing to do with the empty box of
chocolates on my desk. The real reason I’m thinking of all things sweet is that
my book Cowboy Charm School has just been published and it features a
heroine who owns a candy shop.
While
doing the research for my book, I turned up some fun and interesting facts. For
example, we can blame our sweet tooth on our cavemen ancestors and their
fondness for honey. But the most surprising thing I discovered was that
marshmallows grow on trees—or at least used to. That was before the
French came up with a way to replace the sweet sap from the mallow tree with
gelatin.
I also learned that during the middle ages, the price of
sugar was so high that only the rich could afford a sweet treat. In fact,
candy was such a rarity that the most children could expect was an occasional
sugar plum at Christmas. (BTW: there are no plums in sugar plums. Plum is another word for
good).
This changed during the early nineteenth century with the
discovery of sugar-beet juice and mechanical candy-making machines.
Soon jars of colorful penny candy could be found in every
trading post and general store in the country. It took almost four hundred
candy manufacturing companies to keep up with the demand.
This changed the market considerably. Children as young
as four or five were now able to make purchases independent of their parents.
(Had youngsters known that vegetables including spinach were used to color
candy, they might not have wasted their money.)
Children weren’t the only ones enjoying the availability
of cheap candy. Civil War soldiers favored gumdrops, jelly beans, hard candy and
hub wafers (now known as Necco wafers).
Never
one to miss a trend, John Arbuckle off coffee fame, noted the sugar craze that
had swept the country and decided to use it as a marketing tool. He
included a peppermint stick in each pound bag of Arbuckle’s coffee to encourage
sales.
“Who
wants the peppermint?” was a familiar cry around chuck wagons.
This
call to grind the coffee beans got a rash of volunteers. No rough and
tumble cowboy worth his salt would turn down a stick of peppermint candy,
especially when out on the trail.
Arbuckle
wasn’t the only one to see gold in candy. Outlaw Doc Scurlock, friend of Billy
the Kid and a Bloody Lincoln County War participant, retired from crime in
1880. Though he was still a wanted man, he moved to Texas and opened up a candy
store.
Cadbury,
Mars and Hershey rode herd on the chocolate boom of the late 1800s, early
1900s. Penny candy still made up eighteen percent of candy sales but, by
that time, some merchants had refused to sell it. Profits were thin and
selling such small amounts to children was time-consuming. Chocolate was more
profitable. The penny candy market vanished altogether during World War II when
sugar was rationed. Fortunately, no war could do away with chocolate.
Okay,
now that your sweet tooth has gone into overdrive, tell us the name of your
favorite candy? Anyone have a candy memory to share?
New York Times bestselling author MARGARET BROWNLEY has penned more than forty-five novels and novellas. She's a two-time Romance Writers of American RITA® finalist and has written for a TV soap. She is also a recipient of the Romantic Times Pioneer Award.
Her story, A Pony Express Christmas, will appear this fall in the Old West Christmas Brides collection, and book two of her Haywire Brides series will be published May 2019. Not bad for someone who flunked eighth-grade English. Just don't ask her to diagram a sentence.
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