Do You Trust Me? by BG Thomas | Cat's ARC Review, Author Guest post, Excerpt & #giveaway @Dreamspinners

The path to happiness starts with acceptance, and sometimes the chance for a bright, loving future means letting go of the past.

All his life, Neil Baxter has buried a large part of himself—the part that’s attracted to other men. He married a woman and denied that side of him existed. And he plans to keep right on pretending to be straight after his beloved wife has passed away.

To help him deal with his grief, Neil’s sister-in-law convinces him to vacation at a dude ranch. There, Neil meets Cole Thompson, a young, gorgeous, unabashedly gay wrangler—who is unabashedly attracted to Neil. And try as he might, Neil cannot deny he feels the same way. But desire soon becomes something more profound as the two men get to know each other. Cole is much more than a sexy cowboy: he’s kind, spiritual, and intelligent. In fact, he’s perfect for Neil… except he’s a man, and Neil isn’t ready to let go of a lifetime of denial. If he cannot find the courage to be true to himself, he might let something wonderful slip through his fingers.

Buy links: Dreamspinner | Amazon | Amazon UK | B&N | Kobo

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Cat gives this one...

When I saw B.G. Thomas and Cowboys, I jumped up and down! One of my favorite authors and a favorite in the genre. I wasn't let down! This book delivered on so many levels. It does start out on a sad note.

Niel is still grieving over the loss of his wife. It's been two years, but he hasn't let go. Now his sister in Law is also grieving. Her husband died of cancer and had Ben dead two months. She asks Neil to go on vacation at their favorite dude ranch so she can say goodbye to her husband and move on. Niel isn't happy about going to a ranch. He is afraid of horses and after looking at the website and finding out one of the wranglers is gay. He does break down and go for his Sister in law.

Both are mourning in their own ways. B.G.Thomas has a way to add a touch of humor to his stories. In this case, it was reined in and just enough to lighten the initial sorrow.
Once the story gets going we get hints that Neil has a past he wishes to keep hidden. There were times I wanted to smack Neil, but all in all, it came out in the wash, and I adored him.

There is a lot going on in this story. We have the attraction between Neil and Cole, and then some other things pop up. The story is fast paced, complex, intriguing characters and a very satisfying ending. I loved this book. B.G. give me more cowboys!

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Guest post with Author BG Thomas....

In The Beginning: Cowboys!

In the beginning, there was an open call for submissions. A publisher was looking for cowboy stories. Cowboys could be historical or modern, but they preferred modern cowboys. Me? I was a fairly new writer and the idea of writing a cowboy story was too good to resist. This publisher only had open calls for submissions once a year. And the stories had to be under 40 thousand words. Doesn’t sound hard.

As it turns out, it was very hard. My story involved a closeted gay man who has never really even come out to himself. Circumstances take him to a Dude Ranch—the last place he would ever go. He’s afraid of horses and especially afraid to meet one of the ranch’s wranglers, and out a proud gay man. Who is also gorgeous. A lot needed to happen in that story. A whole lot. And quite suddenly I had hit my word count and my two guys had barely fallen in love.

I spoke with a friend who had worked for the publisher for years and she let me know that these people meant business. When they said 40K they meant 40K. It also proved to them that you could follow directions—honor them as well.

So this is what I did. I painfully removed a couple thousand words and then wrote an ending that wrapped everything up—way too quickly. It killed me. I felt it took the soul out of the story. Took the heart from Neil and Cole as well. Took the romance right out of the story.

The publisher however disagreed and bought my story. It sold pretty well too. I even got a number of emails from readers telling me how much they liked the story. Whew! What a relief. Maybe I had just been too close to the story. A publisher and a quite a few readers wouldn’t have liked the story if they thought it had no soul, right?

Now,  a few years passes and sadly, the publisher goes out of business. But the rights of my story have returned to me. I am sad. I love that story, even if I thought I’d had to hack it up a bit. Then I got an idea.

In the years since I wrote that story I became pretty much exclusive to Dreamspinner Press. I sent them the story and asked what they thought about it. They liked it. But they did feel it had been rushed a bit and wondered if I might want to add 20-30K to flesh it out. OMGosh!!

To say I was excited was an understatement! So I took it, reread it to make it fresh in my mind, and then filled it in. We’re not talking padding here. Oh no! All those images I’d left out were coming back to me. Like a beautiful fresh breeze. I wrote wrote wrote, letting nothing get in my way—I even called in sick to work a few days—and I wrote the original ending I’d always wanted to write. One that didn’t have my heroes meeting, falling in love, and moving in with each other in a week’s time. I’ve seen that happen in real life and those relationships never, ever last.

Now the book was getting the ending I’d dreamed of giving it. The result was the story, “Do You Trust Me?” And I couldn’t have been more excited by the results.

And the blurb should show you those results!

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How about an excerpt?

“You want me to go to a dude ranch?” I asked, my eyes a goggle in surprise.

“In Owen’s place,” Amy replied. Her voice was quiet but strong, and did not waver.

Owen. I sighed. Her husband. Her deceased husband.

“Owen was so determined he’d make it. At least this far. He wanted it so much.” She paused. “The kids need this, and frankly…well, so do I.”

“But a dude ranch?” While my late wife Emily’s sister didn’t know me as well as Emily had, Amy and I had still been friends for years, especially the last two. She knew I was not the outdoorsy type. And horses terrified me. They had ever since one had thrown me at a church camp when I was a kid. Sometimes I had dreams of one of the beasts, the size of the Trojan horse, snorting and rolling its eyes wildly, and I’d wake up in a cold sweat.

I shuddered.

“The trip’s all paid for. It would be stupid for me to cancel. And after this, I don’t know if we’ll ever go back. The kids are growing up. I certainly won’t want to go all by myself. This was more for them anyway.”

I nodded. The whole family loved that ranch. Big Bear Ranch or Wild Bear… something like that. They’d even taken my daughter with them—for years.

“I think,” she said with a sigh, “it’ll be a good way to say goodbye to Owen. Our favorite place….” Then she looked up at me and her eyes were glassy. Tears? Amy? But instead of crying, she gave a little laugh. “Kids? Did I say ‘the kids’?” She laughed again. “We went for Owen. God, he loves… loved… that place. He fashioned himself a real cowboy.”

She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand, and to my surprise I found I was laughing a little. Owen, a cowboy? It sure explained why he wore that damned cowboy hat every single year when they got home. At least for a week or so. Then reason would assert itself, and the hat would disappear somewhere in the house.

“Yes,” she said with a half smile. “A good way to say good-bye. Pay him honor, you know? One more time?”

I nodded once, trying to understand.

“Which is why I wanted to know if you’d please come. It’ll be easier, you know? You might help fill the void that’s going to be there. And Owen’s left a mighty big void. It’ll be a lot less lonely for me, you know…?”

“But a dude ranch?” I asked again. Outside? Heat? Bugs? And… horses?

Amy looked at me in that I-can-read-your-mind way of hers (and sometimes I wondered if she could). “Neil, you’re not going to be sleeping on the ground or having to rub two sticks together to start a fire. It’s not like church camp. The cabins are nice. Very modern. They have their own bathrooms and everything. Showers even. No communal showers, okay? And you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. You don’t have to ride one single horse—not even one time. Just….” Her voice caught. “Keep me company?”

“Okay,” I agreed suddenly, holding up my hand. “I’ll go.”

I made the decision just like that before I could change my mind. It was the look on her face that did it. The slump of her shoulders and the tone in her voice. All of this was so not Amy. Not the always strong woman I’d known for half my life. She’d borne so much with Owen’s death. Now a vacation seemed to be tearing her down. And I couldn’t stand that. Couldn’t stand to see her that way. She really was the strongest person I’d ever known. Stronger even than Em.

Amy had, for all intents and purposes, saved me when my wife died. She had been there for me. Every day. Getting me through it. Could I be there any less for her now that she had lost her husband?

“I’ll go,” I said again as she looked at me with those blue-green eyes of hers. Usually I could only see the green when the lights were right or the sun was shining on her face. Her near tears had brought out the blue.

“You mean it, Neil?” she asked. She bit her lip, and I knew she was fighting back tears. She was an Olsen after all, and Olsen women did not show weakness.

“I mean it,” I said, turning the words “nice cabins with showers” into a mantra in my mind.

Amy surprised me by stepping right up to me, laying her head on my chest, and wrapping her arms around my waist. I’m a big man, at least compared to her. Amy was even more petite than Emily had been, and when I put my arms around her, she practically disappeared. It was like holding my daughter, Crystal. She even had the same fall of wavy auburn hair as Em and Crystal. Like almost everyone in the Olsen family.

Cancer had taken months to kill her husband, and I couldn’t figure out which of the two of us had the better deal. The aneurysm had taken Em in a heartbeat; I’d had no time to prepare. No time to say good-bye. Owen, on the other hand, had lived for nearly a year. Nine months, a little longer. Ten. I wasn’t sure. Amy had been given the chance to try to prepare herself—if anyone can prepare themselves for losing the love of their life. But the horror of Owen’s lingering disease made me wonder if it had been a good thing in the long run. To watch Em waste away would have driven me insane.

“It’s all right,” I told her and hugged her tight.

She was taking her family on their traditional annual family vacation—without her husband, without her children’s father. Me? I couldn’t imagine why she would want to go to her family’s favorite place in the world. I wouldn’t—or couldn’t—in the same circumstance. Owen had only been dead for two months. Em had been gone for almost exactly two years, and I still wasn’t living. Not really.

I’d wanted to sell the house, get rid of everything in it—anything that would remind me of Emily. I couldn’t sleep in our room for months. I’d slept on the couch instead. How could Amy go back, with her kids, to the ranch they had gone to every summer for years? Wouldn’t every cabin, every building, every horse, every bend in the river, every chorus of “Home on the Range” around the campfire remind her of Owen?

Wouldn’t his ghost be everywhere?

But different people cope with grief in different ways, and she was, after all, an Olsen. The whole family was strong, the women especially. So where I’d wanted to flee from anything that reminded me of my wife, Amy wanted to bathe in all things that reminded her of Owen. She thought that was a good way to say good-bye. Who was I to say which was better?

Because really, if Amy hadn’t shown up a few weeks after Em’s death and kicked me in the ass, I might still be sleeping on the couch. I probably wouldn’t even have a job. She had to remind me I had responsibilities, to my daughter if nothing else.

Thank goodness for Amy. At a time when she should’ve been grieving herself—Em had been her sister twice as long as she had been my wife, after all—she helped me deal with my own pain.

So yes, even though a week at a dude ranch sounded like the last way on Earth I would want to spend my vacation time, it was something I would do.

I didn’t really have a choice.

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I hope that whet your appetite to read more! It’s being released February 3rd, and I couldn’t be happier. 

I hope you’ll be happy too! Namaste everyone. Hopefully I will see you at Black Bear Guest Ranch!

BG “Ben” Thomas

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B.G. Thomas lives in Kansas City with his husband of more than a decade and their fabulous dogs Sarah Jane and Oliver. He is blessed to have a lovely daughter as well as many extraordinary friends. He has a great passion for life.

B.G. loves romance, comedies, fantasy, science fiction, and even horror—as far as he is concerned, as long as the stories are character driven and entertaining, it doesn’t matter the genre. He has gone to literature conventions his entire adult life where he’s been lucky enough to meet many of his favorite writers. He has made up stories since he was a child; it is where he finds his joy.

In the nineties, he wrote for gay adult magazines but stopped because the editors wanted all sex without plot. “The sex is never as important as the characters,” he says. “Who cares what they are doing if we don’t care about them?” Excited about the growing male/male romance market, he began writing again. He submitted a novella and was thrilled when it was accepted in four days. Since then the romantic tales have poured out of him. “It’s like I’m somehow making up for a lifetime’s worth of story-telling!”

“Leap, and the net will appear” is his personal philosophy and his message. “It is never too late,” he testifies. “Pursue your dreams. They will come true!”

Website/blog: bthomaswriter.wordpress.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bgthomaswriter

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