GETTING LUCKY IS NOW AVAILABLE!
I'm so excited to finally release the second book in the Portland Pioneers series, GETTING LUCKY.
HE MIGHT HAVE STRUCK OUT…
Noah Fox’s life is changing. Ever since he was hit in the head by a pitch, nothing has been the same. Fighting daily headaches and the growing fear that his baseball career is over, Noah goes in search of the woman who once loved and left him.
BUT HE REFUSES TO STOP SWINGING.
What he finds in the tiny town of Sand Point is nothing he could have ever expected. A trained chef and a certified “foodie,” Maggie May King has been perfectly content to devote the last three years of her life to running her baby, the Sand Point Café. Noah’s never met anyone less awed by his good looks or his celebrity, and even though she’s the last person he should be befriending, he finds himself seduced by Maggie’s sweetness and her even sweeter orange rolls.
BEHIND THE STORY:
When I published The Lucky Charm, all I had of Getting Lucky was the setup of Noah Fox's injury and a wild, crazy idea that maybe the last person he should be interested turns out to be the ONLY person he's interested in.
What can I say? Apparently I love making things difficult for myself.
By the way, that will totally be written on my tombstone: "Beth: making things difficult for herself since 1984."
I also made the crazy, ambitious choice to try to write this book in four months. Yes, I know some people write like four books in four months. Unfortunately I own this whole other business and I don't think my clients would have been very happy if I disappeared into my writing cave. I don't think my fiance would be very happy either.
I've talked about some of the struggles I had writing The Lucky Charm, which in all its iterations took me about 2 and a half years to finish. So four months was pretty ambitious. My worst fear was getting to the end of the draft and realizing it all had to be different.
But guess what! You learn so much writing your first book. So many, many things to avoid. So many things you keep saying to yourself, "I wish I'd done this differently." Getting Lucky was my opportunity to make good on the learning experience, and this book practically wrote itself.
Noah was so fun to delve into--a little bit more melancholy at first than he was in The Lucky Charm--and Maggie May was a breath of fresh air. I didn't actually end up putting this in the book, but Maggie May's mom is definitely a huge Rod Stewart fan, and yes, that is where she got her name!
An Excerpt from GETTING LUCKY:
Noah Fox was practically holding a press conference in her Café. Apparently word had spread overnight that a famous baseball player had arrived in Sand Point and this was apparently the most exciting thing anyone had experienced in years, because the awed expressions on everyone’s faces was just plain sickening.
Unsurprisingly, he was eating up the attention, smiling and laughing like he was just like them, but he wasn’t, Maggie inwardly raged. She stomped right up to his stupid, hot self and poked him hard in the arm. She resolutely ignored how firm and muscley his biceps felt.
“I hear you’d like to talk to me,” she said when he turned to her.
“Oh, Maggie. Just the woman I wanted to see,” he said with so much transparent delight she wanted to smack it right off that ridiculously handsome face. No man should look that good, she thought rebelliously, it was unfair to the rest of the mortal world.
“My office,” she spit out, and walked off, weaving between the tables and slack-jawed customers, not even bothering to glance behind to see if he’d followed her.
He was in Tabitha’s thrall, and Maggie was apparently the only way he could find her; of course he’d follow.
They reached the office and she gestured him inside and shut the door behind her. It was only at that moment, looking up at him, thinking, god, he’s so tall, that she realized she’d made a slight miscalculation.
The office was so small, there was barely room for her desk and a single chair, with the built-in shelves towering over her desk, but Noah was definitely not a small guy. He filled the open space so completely, Maggie pressed her back to the door and still felt nearly overwhelmed by his over-sized presence.
Shit.
But she couldn’t back down now by opening the door and moving this meeting to another location. That would be tantamount to admitting he got to her and he really didn’t. She wasn’t as weak-willed and superficial as the rest of Sand Point—or her sister—was.
“You have time to talk to Tabitha last night?” Noah asked with nearly as much transparent eagerness as Hannah had displayed earlier.
Maggie shook her head sharply. She really didn’t want to go into why she’d been so distracted either. Even though this Noah Fox presented himself as everyone’s super genial friend, he was still a complete stranger.
“Oh,” Noah replied, ducking his head down low, a faint flush of embarrassment on his cheeks, and for the second time, she saw the depth of the darkness in his eyes. And didn’t it intrigue her more this time than it did before? Maggie cut off that thinking hard and sharp. She was not going to forget what Hannah had said before she’d been forced to interrupt her search for a repair.
“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing,” Maggie said more than a little testily. “Or what you’re saying.”
His disarming smile was practically a master class in innocent charm. When he folded those muscled arms against his firm chest, she had to remind herself yet again that he was a huge jerk.
“I don’t appreciate you going around talking about me that way,” Maggie repeated. “We’re not involved. You’re here to find Tabitha.”
His white teeth flashed against that tan skin again. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Maggie’s temper roiled. This was probably how he lived his whole stupid, privileged life—going around doing whatever the hell he wanted, and blasting women with that goddamn smile when his trail got too messy and he had to clean up a bit. “Buddy,” she bit off, “you do not want to fuck around with me today. It’s been a spectacularly awful twenty four hours, and I really can’t take your bullshit right now. So cut the crap and stop making people think I’m why you’re here.”
“What’s happened? I hope it wasn’t me that made things tough on you.” He had the nerve to look genuinely concerned.
Maggie grimaced. “Hardly. You’re not so high on my priority list that you showing up in my town ruins my life. If we want to start with this morning, my exhaust fan wouldn’t turn on and Cal, who could normally fix it in a heartbeat, won’t answer his phone because he’s probably mad at me. And now I’m going to have to spend money I don’t have on a repair.”
She hated the sympathy in his stupid face. “I could take a look at it for you,” he offered and it was such a nice thought she actually stopped herself from rolling her eyes again. She could be difficult sometimes, but she prided herself on not being an ungrateful bitch.
“That’s really not necessary. You wouldn’t know what to look for.”
Noah shoved his hands in his pockets and Maggie resolutely ignored the way the muscles and tendons of his arms flexed at the movement. “I’m actually pretty handy with stuff like that,” he said softly and so unassumingly she never would have guessed he was the same show-off who’d dealt out smiles and genial handshakes in the dining room only five minutes ago.
It was proof of just how close Maggie was to the end of her rope that she considered the idea. It wasn’t like he could do much harm, right? He’d really only be marking time until Cal decided to stop pouting.
“Sure, why not,” she finally said, leaving out her silent assumption that he couldn’t break it worse than it was already broken.
“And, for the record,” he said genially, “I never told Hannah anything. She made her own assumptions.”
Maggie suddenly remembered she was supposed to be furious with him. The ability to disarm women was probably another one of the many tricks he had up his sleeve. “Hannah isn’t prone to vast exaggeration,” Maggie insisted, “some exaggeration, yes, but not making up stories out of thin air.”
In the approximately fifteen minutes they’d spent in each other’s company, she’d never seen him look uncomfortable, but he did now. “I might have hinted a little,” he allowed. “But she was so. . .determined to flirt. And I don’t do that.”
“Anymore,” Maggie added helpfully.
He shot her a look like she was crazy, and it was a testament to how bizarre the last day had been that Maggie actually preferred that look to the panty-melting smile he usually employed.
“I mean,” she added, “that you don’t do that anymore.”
He was beginning to look downright disgruntled and Maggie was secretly—or maybe not so secretly—thrilled at this. He was cute mad. Maybe even cuter than when he was trying to be so hot all the time. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he practically grunted.
“You said you don’t do that. But look at you.” She gestured absently in his general direction but she’d forgotten how cramped the office was, and her fingers brushed the soft fabric of his t-shirt and the firm stomach muscles beneath it. Snatching back her hand, she glanced up at him, ready to apologize for nearly groping him, but the sudden heat in his eyes caught her off-guard.
Maggie knew she should reach behind her, open the door and stop this conversation right now. She didn’t, though, and the only reason she could figure was it had been so long since a guy looked at her with that soft, almost reluctant attraction, even though she knew he was only looking because she faintly resembled her elder sister. She’d needed something all day to cleanse her palate of Cal’s ridiculous flirting, and Noah seemed made-to-order.
“Look at me?” he asked. “What about you? Are you so ugly that nobody could ever imagine you flirting?”
Maggie knew she wasn’t ugly. She also wasn’t her sister. “Hardly.”
“Hardly,” he chuckled, “Not quite how I’d put it, but I guess that works.”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Beth Bolden lives in Portland,Oregon with one cat and one fiance. She wholly believes in Keeping Portland Weird, but wishes she didn’t have to make the yearly pilgrimage up to Seattle to watch her Boston Red Sox play baseball. After graduating from university with a degree in English, Beth unsurprisingly had no idea what to do with her life, and spent the next few years working for a medical equipment supplier, a technology company, and an accounting firm. Now Beth runs her own business as a Girl Friday for small business owners, assisting them with administration, bookkeeping and their general sanity. Beth has been writing practically since she learned the alphabet. Unfortunately, her first foray into novel writing, titled Big Bear with Sparkly Earrings, wasn’t a bestseller, but hope springs eternal.
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