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Book: Cowboy Wants Her Heart - He's her knight in battered boots: Heartlands Book 3 by Kris Pearson

categories: Book, Texas, New Zealand, Rural Romance, Sizzling Romance, Slow Seduction, Kiwi Countryside, Third in Series, Heartlands, Cowboy

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Kris Pearson

about this book: This is the third book in my Heartlands Series, although each of these three romances are separate stories. Why did I call it Cowboy Wants Her Heart? Well, there was definitely money at stake but there was also the tender heart of a rather lonely girl, and the long-delayed reward for Rory the exiled cowboy.

It had a long birth, this book! I originally wrote the first few pages for a competition. It did well. So I took them to one of the Romance Writers of New Zealand conferences. There are always special early-morning reading sessions there - presided over by visiting international editors or agents. From a two page read I received a request to submit three chapters to Mills & Boon.

Okay ... wrote my chapters, sent them off, didn't hear back for EIGHTEEN MONTHS. By then I'd become pretty fed up with the trad publishing system and was doing my own thing. I was busy with Christmas Holiday Hearts, so I needed to finish Ellie's story and introduce Alfie in that before I could write the rest of Cowboy Wants Her Heart.

Getting there yet? No. At about the mid-point I decided to drastically change the plot and add a piece of New Zealand history that both my parents lived through - the catastrophic 1931 Hawkes Bay earthquake. It was my mother's first day of work - the shifting paving stones nipped the heel off her only pair of high-heeled shoes. My grandfather was partly buried under his old brick engineering garage; Dad dug him out. All my family survived, but more than two hundred people didn't. The lasting legacy of this was the huge rebuild of the central area of the city of Napier. The art deco buildings are now world-famous, so this made a nice setting for the story. If you go to my website you can see some of the lovely buildings and a link to the yearly Art Deco festival in Napier, New Zealand.