Release Day Review

Is he in love with an old hotel—or its new owner?

Professional snowboarder Cullen Patrick is successful and kinda famous. So when he inherits an old Colorado hotel from an unknown relative, he really should leave well enough alone.

Matt Nathanson has been managing the Treeline Estates since college. He loved the elderly former owner, and he stands to inherit the place if no one claims it in the next week. Of course, Cullen shows up, and Matt thinks it’s time to move on. He doesn’t want to like Cullen, no matter how engaging the guy is, or how hunky.

Cullen has grand ideas for the Treeline, but he doesn’t want to implement them without Matt, and he’s not sure he’s ready to give up snowboarding. Can Matt convince Cullen that putting down roots is worth it… and maybe catch his heir at the same time?

Title: Catching Heir
Author: Julia Talbot
Release Date: December 1, 2016
Category: Contemporary, Dreamspun Desires
Pages: 220

The Snowboarder in My Past

Hey, y’all! I’m Julia Talbot, and I here to talk about my newest release with Dreamspinner Press, Catching Heir.

The novel is about a professional snowboarder who inherits an old hotel in Colorado. When Cullen gets there, the manager, a hot, if stodgy, man from Texas, thinks he’s about to inherit the hotel, instead. Matt is surprised and angry when he realizes Cullen intends to stay, but we all know hope isn’t lost! This is romance, darn it!

So, when I decided to write a snowboarder, I knew I would have to do some research to see what and who was current in the world of extreme sports, but I also knew some things never change, so I could call upon personal experience.

I lived in Colorado for ten years, and in most of that time, I was a circulation manager at a college library, a small university on the Western Slope, which is what they call the area west of the continental divide. In Grand Junction, you have very few entertainment choices unless you’re “outdoorsy”. Hiking, mountain biking, skiing, rafting, snowboardng… These kinds of activities are super available, and to a man or a woman, most of the eighteen to twenty-one year old kids who worked for me were totally into them.

I had one student in particular, let’s call him Braden, who was a snowboarder. A damned good one from what I could tell, mainly from what the girls said about him. He was obsessed with snowboarding, and when he wasn’t shredding out there in the snow, he was thinking about it, or talking about it, or practicing for it on his skateboard. Braden was the laziest worker I had, and he was never embarrassed to call in sick if there was fresh powder.

If I let Braden work nights, as we were open until eleven pm, I would come in the next morning to security footage of him sliding down the handrail of the atrium stairs standing up or flying past the camera at the front desk on a rolling office chair, feet together, knees bent, hands out for balance.

He made me laugh all the time. The neat thing about Braden was how he knew everything there was about snow and ice. He knew that the closer you were to the coast, the better the snow, so ski areas in Idaho and Nevada, then Utah, then Colorado were preferable. He knew what local slopes, which in Grand Junction could be everything from Vail to Telluride, including the tiny Powderhorn just up the road on Grand Mesa, would be like in any given conditions: wet snow, dry snow, sheet ice. All of it. He was quick to tell me that it was the lift ticket that cost so darned much, and when I gave him one I won to Telluride from a vending machine, attached to a bottle of diet Coke, he was ecstatic, and he brought me back a t-shirt that read: If you can read this, flip my Jeep back over.

When I needed to write Cullen, my snowboarder, I put a lot of Braden in him. The humor and the snow knowledge, the slang like “asspass” and “Shred”. (Asspass is when you fall on your butt and slide.) I also played the what if game. What if Braden had been a child prodigy at his sport. What would he be like if that was all he’d ever done.

I hope I did him justice in the little parts of Braden that I used to build Cullen. And wherever Braden is right now, I hope he’s well on his way to a righteous snow dump so he can bust it down the hill.

Find Cullen and Matt in Catching Heir, my new Dreamspun Desire from Dreamspinner Press.

XXOO
Julia

 

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Dreamspinner Press

 

What a great read. Julia Talbot is a new author to me and I thoroughly enjoyed this one.

Matt is just days away from claiming ownership of The Treeline, a hotel he has worked hard to maintain for years when Cullen, the deceased owners grandson is found and ownership reverts to him. Cullen is a professional snowboarder and never wanted to own a hotel.

Ben, the previous owner wrote a clause in the hotel trust that Matt could never be fired for any reason. His job was and always would be secure at The Treeline. Cullen and Matt will have to work together to ensure the success of The Treeline while Cullen still has his snowboarder’s life to contend with. Along the way feelings are developed and both want to make their arrangement a little more permanent.

I loved his! It was a sweet, low angst read. I loved the progression of the relationship between Cullen and Matt. It felt real, with everyday obstacles and little to no drama.

4 pieces of eye candy

 

Julia Talbot lives in the great Southwest, where there is hot and cold running rodeo, cowboys, and everything from meat and potatoes to the best Tex-Mex. A full time author, Julia has been published by Samhain Publishing, Dreamspinner Press, and Changeling Press. She believes that everyone deserves a happy ending, so she writes about love without limits, where boys love boys, girls love girls, and boys and girls get together to get wild, especially when her crazy paranormal characters are involved. Find Julia at @juliatalbot on Twitter, or at www.juliatalbot.com

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