by: Marcella Bell
Series: Closed Circuit
Genre: Contemporary Multicultural Romance
Release Date: December 27, 2022
Publisher: HQN Books
"Bell brings the diverse world of competitive rodeo to life with vivid details and enhances the slow burn, opposites attract romance with chemistry and banter. Readers will be captivated." Publishers Weekly, starred review.
The rules of being a rodeo queen: no creases, no boyfriends, no mistakes.
With more crowns to her name than hairs on her head, Sierra Quintanilla knows the rulebook inside out. And with Closed Circuit, the reality-TV-meets-rodeo-tour competition, back for a second season, she’s ready to play her part to perfection. But no one is actually perfect. And nothing is more dangerous to a rodeo queen than desire…
As a teenager, Diablo Sosa was sentenced by a judge to attend a Houston youth rodeo program. Now an attorney at law, Diablo spends his days seeking justice. He would never have returned to the arena but for his old mentor, so why does the pounding in his blood feel like a homecoming? Or perhaps that’s down to Sierra, the hostess, who shines brighter than the studio lights.
From Houston to New Orleans, from Miami to Las Vegas, Sierra and Diablo wrestle with a connection that could cost them everything—or else lead them right to where they’re meant to be…
PROLOGUE
Las Vegas, Nevada
DI-A-BLO—DI-A-BLO—DI-A-BLO!
The arena chanted his name in rhythm with the beat that thrummed in his veins, but Diablo Sosa ignored them. Instead, he focused on the near three thousand pounds of rage and muscle that shivered and snorted between his legs.
Memories flooded him as the old, familiar, preternatural calm took over, the world and all of his concerns boiling down into an imperative, issued, as always, in his nana’s voice: don’t let go.
His mind funneled down into a universe with a population of two—himself and a bull.
Every other input was muted, even as its data continued to process in the back of his mind: a crowd loud enough to add to the bull’s agitation, his name on their lips, the ache of his ripped-out heart.
Front and center now, however, it was just him and the bull, his right arm raised in the air, the left bearing responsibility for his entire life as he gripped a tornado. His body was no longer muscle and bone but an overstuffed rag doll whipping in time to a bull’s frantic efforts to unseat him.
Whether or not that occurred was really up to him, though.
To all the world, it would look like he wrestled for dominance—and found it—with a creature more than ten times as massive and a million times as mean as he was.
Looks could be deceiving.
Diablo never beat a bull by control. He’d never beat a bull by strength.
He beat a bull by release—releasing every pent-up emotion, every ounce of heartbreak that weighed him down, every encounter that reminded him he was a Black man who had never learned to hide his strength, everything that reminded him that he was a man who had once lost control of that very same strength, every time he’d had to swallow an insult, every time a woman had refused to love him in public, every time he’d had to give up a fight, all of the setbacks that a man named after the devil had experienced on his way to the top. All of that had to have been enough practice for now.
He’d unleashed everything each time he’d climbed on top of a raging beast, and it had always worked because everything that he held inside was too much, even for a bull.
That was true now, more than ever.
Should he give it all to the bull or should he let the bull tear him apart?
His nana would slap him for even pondering the question.
But there was no nana in this world with the bull; there was no time, no rules and no requirements—just a man with far too much to hold, a name that was too big to carry and a gaping hole inside that could never be filled, meeting a furious beast head-on.
He’d never wanted to cry while riding a bull.
He’d never worn a suit to ride a bull.
It had been a night of many firsts.
As he burrowed into himself, searching for everything he wanted to release at the bull, the creature itself seemed to disappear, leaving only himself at fourteen years old, reliving a memory he’d thought long processed.
“You can change it!” he’d screamed, chest puffed, neck straining, spittle flying. “All you have to do is sign this paper. All you ever had to do—and you could end it.” He’d been hot and wild and thrumming with so much that he didn’t have the words for back then.
Rage. Confusion. Loneliness.
He knew the words now. Back then, though, all that had mattered was that he shed the curse of his name. That, and the desperate need that his nana keep the secret that there had been tears in his eyes when he’d asked—no, pleaded—with her to change it.
“Can’t you see, picarito?” The hand she had laid on his shoulder had been gentle, and somehow that made it worse. “Your name was her apology. ‘I’m sorry that I couldn’t live up to the name you gave me, Mama. Take care of him. Raise him better.’” His nana’s eyes had been like charcoals in her face, her hair still dark then, though streaked by the long sections of gray that had widened with each year of his adolescence. “Your name and your eyes are the only things she gave you. They’re gifts.”
But he had not seen them as gifts. Instead, he let out an unholy screech, ripped the stack of papers in his hands in half and punched a hole through the plaster of their wall.
Like now, he wasn’t a liar back then, and he wouldn’t lie even in his memory.
He’d disappeared again, just for an instant, when hitting the wall.
Just like he had on skid row the evening he’d almost ruined his life.
But only for an instant.
Less than an instant.
The out-of-body experience lasted just long enough to miss his nana’s gasp at the foot of the stairs, but not long enough to miss her long sigh. Not long enough to miss the way her eyelids fell, and her shoulders drooped, slightly.
She had looked exhausted, worn-out.
He had finally succeeded in exhausting the inexhaustible. She had only ever looked so tired once before.
His throat had closed around stuck tears, the knot of them a salty burn in desperate need of release.
He had thought she was going to get rid of him, that he had wrung her dry and she was going to get rid of him. She was going to kick him out on the streets. His mind filled with a reel of the homeless faces he always scanned—searching for a familiar set of eyes.
He couldn’t live like that.
He knew them all, knew they had names and individual backstories. And they knew him. And they knew of him. The proximity and reminder of it was enough to make him panic.
Breath escaping him, throat tightening, chest refusing to do the usual thing of expanding and contracting, he had done what any fourteen year old would have done—he had turned around and run into his room.
And in the process, he had missed his nana taking a deep breath, straightening her spine, squaring her shoulders and recommitting—as she had always done and would continue to do, every other time he tested her—until they both made it through.
She never did give up, and she never did let Diablo change his name.
And because he loved her, he never told her the reasons he wanted to.
He never mentioned the target it painted on his back, nor how it gave his teachers an impression of him before he even stepped into their classrooms, nor how it dared other boys to challenge him and girls to chase him—but only in the shadows.
He didn’t tell her how some of those boys were enraged to the point of violence or that the girls played games to find out if certain rumors about him were true but refused every one of his requests to go to dances.
Like he’d told her, Sierra wasn’t the first but the last in a long line of women ashamed to call him theirs. But at least he’d finally learned how to stand up for himself there.
Sierra…
He never had gone to any dances—never had dressed in an ill-fitting suit and rode around in a rented limo.
He rode bulls, instead.
Even back then he’d known that bulls were the only force powerful enough to take the full strength of his emotions without his having to worry about holding back.
And so now he let go; he released the biggest grief he’d ever experienced, until there was nothing left—no sorrow, no pain, no massive loneliness—just a weapon of a name and the knowledge of how to use it.
Excerpted from The Rodeo Queen by Marcella Bell. Copyright © 2022 by Marcella Bell. Published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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Marcella Bell lives in the mostly-sunny wilds of Southern Oregon with her husband, children, father, and three mismatched mutts. The dry hot summers and four distinct annual seasons of the region are a far cry from the weird rainy streets of Portland where she grew up, but these days she wouldn’t trade her quirky mountain valley home for anyplace else on the planet. As a late bloomer and a yogini, Marcella has always been drawn to romance that showcases love’s incredible power to inspire growth and transformation. The child of a multicultural household, Marcella is especially interested in writing romance that reflects her own family history, as well as the people and places she’s known throughout her life, firmly believing that no matter where someone comes from, everyone is worthy of a happy ending. When not writing, she helps run a small independent bookstore called Rebel Heart Books, drinks tea, travels, teaches yoga, spends time with her family, reminisces about the days when she had time to watch shows, and tries to balance reading for the store’s many book clubs with her insatiable addiction to genre fiction.
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This sounds fantastic.
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