Today the Jaunty Quills welcomes MARY CONNEALY!!

Mary writes inspirational romance with a western flavor for Barbour Publishing. She is married to Ivan, a farmer, and is the mother of four beautiful daughters, Joslyn, Wendy, Shelly and Katy.

Mary is a GED Instructor by day and an author by night. And there is always a cape involved in her transformation.

You can find Mary online at: http://www.maryconnealy.com/
She encourages you to visit her blog and sign up for her newsletter at: http://mconnealy.blogspot.com/

Mary writes:

Petticoat Ranch (Lassoed in Texas Book #1) is about a man who’d never been around women who was dropped into an all-girl world.

I decided to do the flip side of that story in Calico Canyon (Lassoed in Texas Book #2)

I started with prissy, Miss Calhoun, the school marm, and shoved her, completely against her will, into an all-male world.

A fish-out-of-water story is always fun, and an author needs to make it as extreme as possible and still have the hero be heroic, the heroine be delightful and loveable. Not that easy when she doesn’t understand anything about his wild, ill-mannered boys, less about him and nothing about marriage.

There’s a scene in Calico Canyon that shows a little of how completely useless Daniel is at smoothing the way for Grace.

He’s standing with his five sons, about twelve hours after the forced marriage. He went about his business—he had chores to do after all. Right after the vows, Grace crumpled up on the floor of the wretched cave Daniel calls a house and hides under a blanket for the whole day. Daniel and his boys finally work up the nerve to get her to come out and now they’re watching Grace cry:

He and his boys stood absolutely immobilized. The wind moaned around the house and Daniel wondered if he’d have to dig them out in the morning. They lived on fairly high ground. They got a beauty of a snow storm once in a while, he’d heard. A blizzard might cut them off from civilization for a spell, if you could call Mosqueros, Texas civilized. Then he realized there was no way they were going to get to church in the morning. Daniel liked church. He did. But once he showed up with Miss Calhoun in town, his marriage was a done deal.

And that’s when he realized he was still trying to think of a way out of this. But Daniel Reeves was no fool. He could dream all he wanted. He was tied to this woman.

John whispered again, “Is she supposed to get all sad like that, Pa?”

“Yep, in my experience with wives, they’re supposed to fuss about something all the time. I’ve never had me one that didn’t cry up a storm at the drop of a hat.”

Grace lifted her head and scowled through her tears.

Daniel was surprised at his urge to laugh. She was really a mess. The oh-so-tidy Miss Calhoun kept getting herself slopped up more and more. He wondered when she’d gather her wits together enough to care about that.

“Did it ever occur to you that you might be doing things to your wives that make them cry?” She pushed her hair off her soggy face with shaky hands.

“Nope.” Daniel shrugged. “Never was nothing I did.”

This is just Daniel being absolutely clueless and having no idea what it takes to make a woman happy.

The foundational trouble between Daniel and Grace isn’t the fact that they loathe each other—although that’s huge. It’s the fact that Daniel completely blames himself for his first wife’s death in childbirth, plus how brutally hard it was for him to survive with newborn triplets. She had a hard time with the twins birth and Daniel swore there’d be no more babies. But he was weak and his wife wanted to be ‘close’ to him. And then he lost her.

He is so deeply traumatized by it that he won’t risk having another woman carry his child. But once he calms down and quits thinking like a coyote who might well gnaw his foot off to escape from this marriage trap, he discovers a powerful attraction for his new wife.

So there’s a war inside Daniel and, torn between desire and terror, he handles it like any good romance hero…as badly as possible.

Parrish, Grace’s adoptive father, is the villain in Calico Canyon. She’s hostile to men because of her upbringing with an abusive father. Parrish lived well off the salaries of the young girls he forced to work in a carpet mill.

So Grace has a very dim view of men and she expects only bad things from her new life surrounded by six of them. It takes a lot to convince her she hasn’t fallen into a rat hole and ended up married to the King of Rats.

If you’d like to read the first chapter of Calico Canyon you can find it here: http://mconnealy.blogspot.com/2008/06/calico-canyon-wild-card-tour.html