Ruthie Knox Visits to Talk about Bicycling and Ride with Me and Giveaway!!

I am pleased to welcome Ruthie Knox, author of Ride With Me, which will be released February 13th, 2012. Congrats on your new book Ruthie!!

Thanks for having me on the blog, Kathleen! I’m excited to be on tour promoting my debut release, Ride with Me, which comes out on February 13 from Loveswept (Random House).

Ride with Me is a contemporary romance novel set on the TransAmerica Trail, which is a forty-two-hundred-mile bike route that crosses the United States from Oregon to Virginia. Here’s a description of the book...

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Ride with Me, available from Loveswept on February 13, 2012!

In this fun, scorching-hot eBook original romance by Ruthie Knox, a cross-country bike adventure takes a detour into unexplored passion. As readers will discover, Ride with Me is not about the bike!

When Lexie Marshall places an ad for a cycling companion, she hopes to find someone friendly and fun to cross the TransAmerica Trail with. Instead, she gets Tom Geiger — a lean, sexy loner whose bad attitude threatens to spoil the adventure she’s spent years planning.

Roped into the cycling equivalent of a blind date by his sister, Tom doesn’t want to ride with a chatty, go-by-the-map kind of woman, and he certainly doesn’t want to want her. Too bad the sight of Lexie with a bike between her thighs really turns his crank.

Even Tom’s stubborn determination to keep Lexie at a distance can’t stop a kiss from leading to endless nights of hotter-than-hot sex. But when the wild ride ends, where will they go next?

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The TransAmerica Trail is, admittedly, a rather unusual setting for a romance novel, so I wanted to talk a bit today about why I chose it for Ride with Me.

It probably goes without saying that I’m a cyclist. Not a crazy gear-head one — I actually don’t even watch the Tour de France, which is like a cardinal sin for anyone who calls herself a cyclist — but I do love to ride.

I started young, like most people do, and then when I was around twelve years old I participated in a week-long ride that they do every year in Ohio called the Great Ohio Bicycle Adventure. Now, I don’t know if you remember being twelve, but I do. It was awful—like walking around with all your organs exposed. I never felt beautiful or comfortable or adequate, especially when it came to physical, sporty things. Competitive sports and I are lifetime enemies. So it was a really amazing experience for me to ride my bike three hundred miles in the hot, humid Ohio summer. I felt amazing and accomplished and unusual, you know? Like I was capable of secret, hitherto-unsuspected feats of endurance and willpower. That’s a pretty special thing for a twelve-year-old to experience.

So, anyway, biking became important to me, and even though I left it behind for a few years in college, I found it again as an adult, and I married a man who rides. We’ve been on several week-long bike trips with my parents in Utah, Montana, Colorado, Vermont . . . pretty much all over the country. And in the process of all this travel, all these riding and camping adventures, I got really interested in the whole idea of taking three months to ride all the way across the United States. What kind of person decided to do that? How did it feel? What sort of crazy things would happen in all those miles, all those long days on the road? Those are some of the questions I channeled into Ride with Me.

It’s not really a “sporty” book, anymore than I’m a sporty girl. Instead, Ride with Me is a romantic story about two people who have very different priorities for the ride and for life, and very different ideas about what it means to have an adventure. As they pass from Oregon and Idaho to Kansas and Missouri and finally make it to Virginia, they have their own adventure — one neither of them particularly wants or expects, but one that one that changes them both for the better, forever. Because love is the greatest adventure of all!

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Visit Ruthie at her website here at http://www.ruthieknox.com

Ruthie Knox figured out how to walk and read at the same time in the second grade, and she hasn’t looked up since. She spent her formative years hiding romance novels in her bedroom closet to avoid the merciless teasing of her brothers and imagining scenarios in which someone who looked remarkably like Daniel Day Lewis recognized her well-hidden sex appeal and rescued her from middle-class Midwestern obscurity. After graduating from Grinnell College with an English and history double major, she earned a Ph.D. in modern British history that she’s put to remarkably little use.

These days, she writes contemporary romance in which witty, down-to- earth characters find each other irresistible in their pajamas, though she freely admits this has yet to happen to her. Perhaps she needs more exciting pajamas. Ruthie abhors an epilogue and insists a decent romance requires at least three good sex scenes.

 You can learn more about Ruthie and her debut release here at Random House. There are also links where you can purchase Ride With Me.

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 TransAmerica Trail

Scribd.Ride With Me Excerpt - by author Ruthie Knox

 GIVEAWAY: 

LEAVE A COMMENT WITH YOUR ANSWER TO THE QUESTION AND AN EMAIL ADDRESS WHERE YOU CAN BE REACHED IF YOU WIN. 

                   GIVEAWAY RUNS FROM TODAY FEBRUARY 4TH TO DAY OF RELEASE FEBRUARY 13TH, 2012

And while you are here you could also become my friend on GFC..hint hint..!

A question for readers: What’s the biggest adventure — literal or figurative — you’ve ever had? One lucky commenter will be randomly chosen to win a digital copy of Ride with Me. Winners will pick up their copy through Net Galley. Good luck to all!

Both Ruthie and Sue Grimshaw will be here off and off today, so if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment.

Sue Grimshaw ∙ Category Specialist & Editor at Large∙ Random House Publishing Group

1745 Broadway ∙ New York, NY 10019

sgrimshaw@randomhouse.com

www.romanceatrandom.com

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