Check out this exclusive excerpt from Wild Card by Karina Halle, which is being released August 15!
Related: Wild Card by Karina Halle book review: A gritty, raw, cowboy romance
About ‘Wild Card’ by Karina Halle:
She swore she’d never go back home.
She swore she’d never see the man who broke her all those years ago.
But you don’t always get to choose your path.
And sometimes that path is as wild and rugged as the heart.
Rachel Waters thought she saw the last of the small mountain town of North Ridge, British Columbia, when she left six years ago. But while her advertising career blossomed beneath the skyscrapers of Toronto, her mother’s sudden illness has the 26-year old returning to North Ridge to care for her, putting her career on hold while dealing with family secrets, regrets and unresolved goodbyes.
Shane Nelson has always been a bit of a wild card. The youngest of his brothers, Shane’s spent most of his life being underestimated and misunderstood. With his quiet intensity, classic good looks and thoughtful demeanor, he’s an enigma on horseback, managing his father’s sprawling ranch on the slopes of North Ridge.
But while Shane remains the quintessential brooding cowboy, complete with an arsenal of inner demons, all of that changes when Rachel steps back into his life.
She was the girl he pushed away.
Now she’s the girl who wishes she could leave.
Despite the odds, Shane will do everything to convince Rachel he needs a second chance that he doesn’t deserve but when the two of them head off into the wilderness together in search of lost cattle, more than just their hearts are at stake.
Whether it’s love or lives on the line, one thing is for sure: always bet on the wild card.
‘Wild Card’ by Karina Halle exclusive excerpt:
The word love never sounded so wild as it did when it came from the lips of Shane Nelson.
That one simple word that would set my heart loose, like a horse galloping across the plains, free and real and pure. And yet my heart would always return.
My heart would always return to him.
“I love you, Raven,” he’d say, and I wouldn’t just hear it. I’d feel it. I’d live it. The love he had for me, the love I had for him—it was in my every breath. It hitched the moon in my sky.
Raven was my nickname, partly because it sounded like Rachel, partly because he grew up on Ravenswood Ranch, partly because it was at that ranch, nestled at the foot of Cherry Peak where the forested slopes yield to rolling hills of yellow grass and sagebrush, that I fell in love with the clever birds.
It’s where I fell in love with him.
Shane and I would spend hours on horseback, riding side by side, pretending to help out his father and grandpa by checking on the cattle while the birds called to each other from the tops of the ponderosa pines. The reality is, we just wanted to spend every second we could together. We were nothing if not inseparable.
It’s like we knew that time was running out. Even as a teenager, there was a sense of urgency, like a ticking clock that was counting the long minutes until a bomb went off. I so desperately wanted to run away from North Ridge and never come back. I so desperately wanted, needed, Shane to come with me.
But even though he told me he would, I knew he wouldn’t. His home, his heart, was here. Not with me. And as time continued to wreak havoc on us, as we made wild love like we were dying, afraid of the distance when we weren’t skin to skin, the more Shane continued to pull away. I didn’t see it at the time but then again, you never do.
Loss of love is the most terrifying feeling in the world. It’s the feeling of your heart emptying, slowly being drained. Because that’s the thing about love. It’s free to give. It’s never free to receive. We all know the cost of loving someone, of being open-hearted, open-souled. We know that at any moment it could all end. The world is filled with worst-case scenarios. People die. People cheat. People fall out of love. People lose sight of who they are, or what they want. People…they grow apart.
I’m still not sure what happened on that fateful night—which of the above it was that made everything crash and burn around us. What led Shane to do the things he did, what made him smash my bleeding heart into smithereens.
All I knew was that the love we shared was over.
Years of being full.
Heartful, soulful, wonderful.
All gone.
And he finally gave me the will, the drive, to leave North Ridge behind.
Never to look back.
Never to return.
Until now.
Wild Card by Karina Halle will be released on August 15! Pre-order now on iBooks, Nook, and Kobo. And don’t forget to add it to Goodreads!
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