Dear Readers,

I love writing cowboy stories. So iconic. So fun. The men have their own rules, ooze confidence and action is their language. So, I can’t help wanting to mess with their heads just a little bit—stir them up, throw them off their game. This vision and desire—to throw something new into the cowboy mix started at my niece’s wedding three years ago. My husband of twenty plus years is originally from India, and my talented sister-in-law knows how to throw a gorgeous, slap down party so when her only daughter got married, it was three days of food, family, friends and celebrating. We took over a hotel in Charlotte, and the wedding was flawlessly fun and elegant to the point that I felt like I’d walked into a reality show.

The prologue in The Cowboy Says I Do, is what sparked my idea of the Montana Rodeo Brides series. At my niece’s wedding, all the women, swimming in vibrant color burst out of the hotel lobby to meet the groom—on a horse—with his entourage surrounding him. Bhangra music blared from the back of a truck leading the way down the street and into the hotel parking lot. We began dancing and laughing and everyone talking at once. My teen daughter was wearing a beautiful saffron salwar kameez that my friend, Mary Krummel had sewn for her from fabric I’d ordered online. We were spinning around looking at how the sun shone through the different fabrics of the scarves and skirts—saffron, magenta, teal, and I wanted to capture the visual beauty and movement along with the sense of beginning and an ending of sorts. Hope, love and adventure imbued that day. But I still felt a pang of loss of the little girl I’d watched grow up into a beautiful, accomplished and confident woman waiting to start her new life in a new home.

As our world started shutting down and my college-age son had to come home and my daughter’s high school senior year was cut brutally short in March 2020, I missed our family in North Carolina more and more as we could no longer visit. I started brainstorming a new series to write. I’d wanted to include a piece of my husband’s and children’s heritage. Even though I couldn’t visit my family, I could have them with me in a story. My first East Indian-American heroine was born. And then I gave her a cowboy to love.