Carolyn Brown: Raylan Givens helps get the job done

Carolyn Brown, author of the new Billion Dollar Cowboy, explains how the hero on Justified helped her manage the characters in her romance.

Carolyn: Good morning, folks! I've got a brand new cowboy book out this month that I've been crowing about to everyone who will stand still and listen. Billion Dollar Cowboy is the debut book in the four-book Cowboys & Brides series. I'm so excited to see it on the book shelves, in my readers' hands and to be receiving fan mail about it. How do you like that cover? I flat-out squealed when I saw it. Turn the book over and this is what you'll read on the back blurb …

A Billionaire Can Buy Anything ... Colton Nelson was twenty-eight years old when he won the Texas Lottery and went from ranch hand to ranch owner overnight. Now he's desperate to keep the gold diggers away. It shouldn't be too hard to find a pretty girl and hire her to pretend to be his one-and-only.

Or Can He? Laura Baker's got mixed feelings about this—she's on the ranch to work, not to be arm candy. On the other hand, being stuck for a while in the boondocks with a gorgeous cowboy isn't half-bad.

What neither Colton nor Laura expects are the intensely hard lessons they have to learn about the real cost of love…

Here are the first lines:

It was just supper, for God's sake; it wasn't an inquisition. They weren't going to take her out in the yard and stone her to death if she ate with the wrong fork.

That's exactly how I felt when I started writing this book. Colton had told me in the beginning that he was just a plain old cowboy at heart, but hey, he owned one of the biggest ranches in Texas and he was a billionaire, for goodness sakes. I wasn't sure that I could write about the world of the rich and famous, even if he did wear scuffed-up work boots, faded jeans and a hat that looked like it had been run over by a truck. I could probably do a better job with Laura. Like her, I'd been raised on the wrong side of town. Hopefully, my readers wouldn't take me out in the yard and stone me if I didn't get the picture of the fabulously rich folk just right.

Then I remembered Justified, which is my all-time-favorite series. Raylan Givens might not be a billionaire, but he lives in a motel or above a bar or wherever he can find a bed at night, and he still gets the job done. And Raylan is a whole lot like Colton Nelson. He has trust issues, baggage from the past, a crazy life and in spite of it all, he gets the job done.

So Raylan became my muse throughout the book. If Colton and I had a disagreement over what happened next, we brought in a third party and asked Raylan to settle the dispute. And if Laura and I didn't see eye-to-eye? Well, Raylan usually went to Winona or Ava and then got back with me when he got a woman's take on the problem.

I figured out that whoever said, "Money is just dirty old paper with dead presidents' pictures on it," is a genius. Colton Nelson had money, but it did not define him. Laura Baker didn't have money, but that fact sure didn't define her. And in the end dollar bills weren't as important as the heart. The heart has no ears or eyes. It doesn't care if money is paper, gold or sea shells. But the heart does want what it wants … and it can whine and make a person miserable until it gets what it wants!

As readers, what makes you pick up a book? Cover? Back blurb? First few lines … or do you like an author well enough to see her/his name and just automatically take their newest release to the checkout counter? (To comment, click on the gray comment balloon on the left side of your browser window.)

To find out more about Carolyn and her books, visit www.carolynlbrown.com. You can also connect with her on Facebook and her Facebook fan page.