Cowboy Dreamin’ by Starla Kaye

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Starla Kaye wears many hats professionally and as a writer. She is the community coordinator for a Midwestern accounting firm, a gerontologist who volunteers with an active group of senior adults, a mentor/teacher of writing, and a multi-published author.

She has been writing and publishing in different romance sub-genres and lengths for twenty years. Her first published book, Tug of Love, was a “sweet” romance published with iUniverse. Now she mainly writes edgier romances with an erotic or slightly naughty focus.

Starla enjoys writing about strong-willed, independent women who butt heads with equally determined, self-confident, and slightly domineering men. Her belief in relation to her heroes is to find them their perfect match, but make him really work for the happily-for-now or happily-ever-after with the woman who wins his heart. Of course, she likes her heroines to be challenged as well. Love isn't easy.

To date she has published twenty novels, thirty-eight novellas, eight anthologies, three audio books, and eighteen short stories. Starla writes for Decadent Publishing, Black Velvet Seductions, and Blushing Books.

Social Media Links

Website: http://starlakaye.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/starla_kaye

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

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/starlakaye/

Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/Starla-Kaye/e/B002ZH8K3U

Goodreads Page: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5494986-starla-kaye

Authors Den Page: http://www.authorsden.com/visit/author.asp?authorid=151725

Printable Book List: http://starlakaye.com/my-books/my-complete-book-list/

ABOUT THE BOOK

Book Title: Cowboy Dreamin’

Publisher: Decadent Publishing

Dates Published:

E-Book: February 11, 2014

Audio Book: October 26, 2015

Genres: Contemporary, Erotic Romance, GLBT, Gay Romance, Ménage, Western Romance

Heat Rating: R+

Page Count: 66

AUDIO BOOK  BUY LINKS

Audible: http://www.audible.com/pd/Fiction/Cowboy-Dreamin-Audiobook/B017224SQK/

Amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/Cowboy-Dreamin-1Night-Stand-Book/dp/B017224RM0/

ITunes:  https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/audiobook/cowboy-dreamin-1night-stand/id1052883423?mt=3

SOUND CLOUD Sample:  https://soundcloud.com/decadent-publishing-audio/cowboy-dreamin-by-starla-kaye-audio-book-sample

E-BOOK INFORMATION:

ISBN: 9781613336618

ASIN: B00IEO1D8W

BN ID: 2940148326496

E-BOOK BUY LINKS

Decadent Publishing

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

iBooks

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BLURB

Kendra spends her days and nights running a business, sculpting, and leading a Tahitian dance group in Kauai. She can’t squeeze anything else into her life, but she dreams of cowboys. Sexy, hot cowboys in tight jeans, low-tipped Stetsons, and dusty boots. Men who know all about how to please a woman. She enjoys her fantasies, but can’t imagine ever settling down. But one night with one would be so nice. Surely that would get her dreams of a white knight cowboy sweeping her off her feet out of her system.

Because of an accident that Shane believes left him “less of a man,” he doesn’t see a wife and children in his future. Carson, his ranching partner—and sometimes lover—thinks Shane is wrong. Carson refuses to let Shane settle for a life of rodeo bunnies who only want a romp in bed with a bull rider. Shane deserves more than that. He manages to sign Shane up with a matchmaking service to, hopefully, meet another kind of woman, maybe someone who will appreciate Shane for the man he is. Except Madame Evangeline expects both of the cowboys to go on this special one night date. It doesn’t take long for either cowboy to realize that one night with the purple-haired, hip-shaking beauty in Kauai might not be enough.

GIVEAWAY:

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EXCERPT:

“I can’t do this!” Kendra moaned and glared at Alexis in the dressing room mirror. She had one boob in a coconut cup and one boob that refused to go in the other bra cup. “I can’t!”

Alexis walked over and calmly pushed Kendra’s hands out of the way. She lifted the problem coconut shell cup and gently guided the uncooperative breast into place. “Situation resolved.”

Tears threatened and Kendra’s stomach churned. “That was only part of what’s wrong.”

She’d been stressed ever since learning about this arranged meeting between her and the two cowboys from Kansas. She’d been dreaming about a fantasy, sexy cowboy for so long. But two at the same time? What if neither of them met her visualization? Would she be soured on all cowboys? Would her fantasies be ruined forever? She didn’t have time in her harried life for more than the occasional fantasy. She needed it.

She exhaled deeply, wincing at the slight movement of the rough shells over her tender breasts. She still hadn’t gotten around to replacing the felt lining and she would pay for that negligence today. “My fantasies are all I have. If this goes wrong…. If they are—”

“This could be far better than those dreams of yours,” Alexis chastised with a frown. “It’s two cowboys.”

Kendra paced away and fluffed out her skirt. “Could be being keywords.”

A tear trickled down her cheek and she dashed it ruthlessly away. Then her shoulders slumped and she mumbled miserably, “I should never have agreed to any of this.” She glowered at Alexis. “You pushed me into it, all of it. Agreeing to spend some kind of night with two cowboys is bad enough. But you accepted this dance show without discussing it with me. And they are supposed to meet me here.”

She paced across the small room again, fluffing the sides of her grass skirt again. “First impressions are a big deal, you know. And here I’ll be shimmying my ass around wearing a pink skirt made of fake grass and bouncing my boobs in a really dumb coconut shell bra.”

To her disgust, Alexis laughed. “They’ll think themselves the luckiest cowboys in the world.”

My Aviation History

I’m a baby boomer, a child of the space-age.  Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier two years before I was born and I was six when the Russians launched Sputnik and the Space Race was on.  To me, flying was as natural as walking or driving, if you had enough money to do so.  My family wasn’t poor, but we weren’t rich either.  We were part of President Eisenhower’s vast Middle Class, although I saw us as part of the lower half because my dad drove a truck, my mother worked in a factory (much to my embarrassment), and we lived in the city, not the suburbs.  Oh, we had a TV, and Daddy bought a new car every two years.  We lived in a house, not an apartment, and I was in Girl Scouts and choir and I got new clothes every spring and fall, and I heard the usual admonitions about children starving in China if I didn’t clean my plate.  I got a transistor radio when I was ten and my own stereo when I was twelve, and every summer we visited my cousins in the country, so maybe we were upper middle class in terms of income.

When I was ten, I went to visit my cousins over Spring Break.  My uncle drove me up to Iron Mountain, Michigan from Chicago, but then his plans changed and he couldn’t drive back.  How could my family get me home?  I don’t know who came up with the idea of flying me home, but my aunt put me on a North Central Airlines flight.  I flew on a converted Douglas C-47. The plane was a troop transport during World War II, converted from a DC-3 passenger plane.  After the war, many airline companies bought the surplus planes and re-converted them to passenger planes.  Like Sydney Bellek and Elian Davies in M. S. Spencer’s Lapses in Memory, I received my “wings” on that flight.

My next flight was aboard a Cessna.  I don’t recall the model.  My sister, brother-in-law, and their best friends rented a cottage in Eagle River, Wisconsin and took me along to babysit.  That was a disaster.  I was fine in the city, but when a raccoon got into our garbage outside the only door I could have used to go for help, and I was stuck in the woods without a phone, this city girl panicked thinking it was a bear.  The next time the adults went out, they got a sitter for me.  But I digress…  We went on an aerial tour of the resort area, and at the age of twelve, I got to sit up front, next to the pilot.  That was so cool!

I didn’t get to fly again until I graduated from high school.  My graduation gift from my parents was a trip to Los Angeles to visit an aunt and uncle out there.  I got to see the mountains and go to Disneyland, but I didn’t get to see the ocean.  That was my first experience on a jet.  I believe it was a Boeing 707.  I had a few flights on those and 727s—a couple more vacations, and then my flights to and from Boot Camp and the Navy Hospital at Oakland, California.  The difference is in the engines.  A 707 had engines on the wings, while 727s had them on the tails.

I discovered the Boeing 737 Baby Jet when I was engaged.  My fiancé was stationed in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and it took two flights to get there from San Francisco.  Three, if you counted the chopper service across the San Francisco Bay!

Yes, I’ve even flown on helicopters.  San Francisco and Oakland Helicopter Airlines made sixty-two passenger flights per day across the Bay between the two airports, using Sikorsky S-62^[3] turbine helicopters.  They even had flight attendants who would make sure each passenger’s seat belt was properly fastened.  Once we were airborne, they would jump up, pass out mints, sit down, buckle up, and we would land.  It was much easier to get to the San Francisco airport than taking busses.  I had to really hang onto my wedding gown when I went home to get married.  It got caught in the updraft and was headed for the rotors!

The weekend of my twenty-first birthday was quite an adventure.  I flew home on a hop out of Travis Air Force Base on a C-131 cargo plane.  We sat backward and instead of a flight attendant, we had a burly sergeant telling us how to don our parachutes and pull the oxygen tanks off the wall in case of an emergency.  (Yes, I used that in Rock Bound.) There was a trailer on board in which some brass were flying across country for some sort of meeting.  We stopped at an Air Force Base in Kansas while they met with someone there.  The sergeant took inside the trailer.  He said it was the one used by the Apollo 11 astronauts during quarantine when they returned to Earth.  I didn’t appreciate the historic significance at the time, because I didn’t realize he meant Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins when they came back from the Moon.  I thought he meant one of the later missions.  Eventually we made it to Scott Air Force Base near St. Louis, and I caught the last civilian flight to O’Hare.

I couldn’t catch a hop back to San Francisco, so I grabbed a civilian flight.  It was a Boeing 747 with a piano bar, and since it was my birthday, I didn’t have to pay for my drinks.  Flying from Central to Pacific time, my twenty-first birthday was twenty-six hours long.  Sydney and Elian spend time aboard a 747 with a piano bar in Lapses of Memory.

My last interesting flight was the hop I caught to Hawai’i.  It was a Lockheed Orion P-3 used by the Navy for anti-submarine and marine observation operations.  I was assigned the starboard observation post.  Being the only female aboard was fun.  I got to sit in the catbird seat behind and above the pilot and co-pilot and watch the sun set over the Pacific.  The navigator let me speak to a picket ship in the middle of the Pacific whose only job was to steam in a tight circle and speak to aircraft to let them know they were on the right course to Hawai’i.  They hadn’t heard a female voice in months.  The drawback was that since I was basically a hitch-hiker, they didn’t bring along a bucket for the head.  Translation—there was no ladies’ room.  And, because the P-3 flies low to spot submarines in the water, it’s not a jet aircraft.  It’s powered by four turbo-props, so it’s slower than a jet.  A flight that takes about four hours by jet takes six hour in a P-3.  Yup—six hours with no restroom.  I didn’t care about seeing my husband when we finally landed.  I just needed to find the facilities.  The crew wanted to wash the plane and put fuel onboard.  I convinced them to let me out at the fuel tanks.  My husband, who had been in the control tower when we landed, was on the stairs and missed my sprint across the tarmac. He was quite flummoxed when the plane finally taxied to the terminal and I wasn’t on board.  The pilot told the tower I was on the flight—where had I gone?

It’s been awhile since I’ve felt the power gathering beneath me, the G-forces pushing me into my seat as we tear down the runway, and the sudden smooth freedom of flight.  I miss it and hope to feel it again someday.  But if I don’t, I hope you will.  And no, I’ve never joined the Mile High Club.  For me, flying’s fun enough.  I cry on takeoff for sheer joy.

“Home” is Where the Sea-Bag Is

Over on the MuseItUp Publishing Blog, some of the authors are talking about their most memorable Christmases. I’m a brand new Muse author, and I did not sign up early enough to participate over there, but as I read my fellow authors’ memories, several of mine keep popping up. Interestingly, they are not Christmases that I spent at “home” with my family. At least, I didn’t think I was “home.” Maybe I was, after all.

When I was twenty, I joined the Navy. My first Christmas away from home, was the year Tim (now my ex) gave me my engagement ring. It wasn’t quite the surprise he thought it would be. We got engaged in August, but we had to wait until we had overlapping leaves in November before I met his parents. When I did, we ordered our rings together from the wholesale company where his father worked. His mother told me how his father had given her ring to her, and Tim tried the same thing. To make matters worse, she wrote and told me the rings were in, so I was expecting it. I’m afraid his surprise fell flat.

But, we were in San Francisco, so we celebrated at our favorite Chinese restaurant, Sam Wo. Edsel Ford Fong presided over the second floor. Eddie would insult people, seat complete strangers together, bully people into eating with chopsticks, and was a local celebrity who has been featured in books such as Armistad Maupin’s Tales of the City. There was a crazy guy who hung out there around the same time. He later told TV guide he learned to speak Cantonese so he could cuss at Eddy in his own language. His name was Robin Williams. That Christmas Eve, 1971. It was slow that night, and when I showed him my ring, Eddy pulled out a couple his photo albums and shared them with us. He sat with us that night and really made us feel special. We weren’t “home” for Christmas, but it was magical to be in one of the most beautiful cities on Earth with my brand-new fiancé and my sparkling new ring.

Christmas of 1974, we were stationed in Hawaii. Home by then was Dubuque, as both of my parents had died and my childhood home in Chicago no longer existed. My neighbors Debbie, Chris and I put the word out on two submarines and one surface ship (target!) that we were making supper and anyone who couldn’t get home was welcome at our house. We ended up with about thirty or forty sailors and a Marine (?). We had two turkeys, a ham and all the trimmings from three families’ worth of handed-down recipes. Tim had just returned from a West Pac (Western Pacific cruise). Elizabeth was one, and we’d just realized I was “probably” pregnant again, so in a way Christine was there, too. We confirmed it in early January.

It was a warm feeling to share our holiday with so many other people who were “stuck” in Hawaii like us. But when I look back, I realize how much of a family we all were. The Navy might tell you they don’t issue a family in your sea-bag, but in a way they really do. The sense of “camaraderie” in the military goes way beyond friendship, or teamwork, or esprit-de-corps. We took care of each other. Tim had duty when I went into labor with Elizabeth, so a neighbor drove me to the hospital. I had already pulled him off the Boat twice that night for false alarms. At that point, I just wanted “something for pain,” and Phyllis’s light was on because her baby was teething. When Debbie was due, her husband was at sea. We had it all worked out. When Debbie went into labor, she’d pound on Chris’s wall, and Chris would pound on mine. Chris’s son, Alan, and Elizabeth were both toddlers. One of us would drive Debbie to the hospital while the other watched the driver’s baby. So, again—just because we weren’t in Dubuque for Christmas, we were home. I just didn’t realize it at the time.

If you're in the military on active duty or you're a military wife stationed far from "home," know that you have the love and support of everyone who came in you or your spouse's foot-locker or sea-bag, as well of all of us back here.

And I hope anyone reading this—whatever holiday you celebrate—you will be among people who love and support you. Wherever they are, you are “home.”