A warm welcome to author Beth Bolden joining us today to celebrate the audio release of “The Rainbow Clause”.
Check out Beth her guestpost and excerpt below 🙂
The Rainbow Clause
Beth Bolden
M/M Romance
Audio Release: 09.07.18
Narrator: Wyatt Baker
Listening Length: 7 hours and 45 minutes
BLURB
Don’t like the athletes. Don’t sleep with the athletes. Don’t fall for the athletes. It had never been particularly difficult to follow the rules, but Nick had a feeling he was about to be tested.
Heisman winner. Member of the national championship team. NFL rookie of the year. Quarterback Colin O’Connor knows he’s become the ultimate romance novel cliché: all the success he’s ever dreamed of but nobody with whom to share it. Too bad it’s not as simple as asking out the next girl who intrigues him – because the next girl to intrigue him probably won’t be a girl at all.
Unexpectedly, the solution comes in one neat package: Nick Wheeler, lead journalist for a leading sports and pop culture blog. Hired by Colin’s team, Nick comes to Miami to shine a spotlight on the NFL’s most private quarterback.
The heat in Miami rises when Nick discovers Colin is nothing like the hollow personality he pretends to be in interviews and he’s even hotter in person than on his Sports Illustrated cover. Nick knows this is the story of his career, and it also hits close to home. What he needs is to help Colin share his story while keeping their growing relationship from boiling over in the press, but what he wants is to tell the world.
Whenever The Rainbow Clause comes up, I always get questioned about Colin O’Connor. What’s your inspiration, people ask? Is he based on a real football player?
The easy answer is no, but the more complex answer is yes.
The National Football League is an extremely lucrative business, and the administration is naturally wary of anything that interferes with bringing in the big bucks. The players involved are paid sometimes an extraordinary amount of money for their skills and their commitment to the game.
It’s like writing a book—they’re technically paid for each game they play, but every game takes preparation, sometimes a life of work to develop and hone the skills they need in that game. I’m paid every time someone one-clicks, but there’s immeasurable hours behind every single release, between writing and editing and marketing.
It’s just that professional athletes get paid for all that time. So we know they’re well-paid, and they’re worshipped for their prowess on the field.
But what about off the field? What sort of responsibility do the players hold for their behavior when they’re not playing?
This is an unpopular opinion, but I believe that if you have that sort of platform and hold that sort of attention in the public eye, you have an obligation to do more than just show up on Sunday and play sixty minutes of football.
I admire JJ Watt and the fundraising he did in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. He took his visibility and his popularity and did a whole lot of good for an enormous amount of people. He could have stood by and done nothing; he didn’t.
Agree or disagree with what Colin Kaepernick did when he knelt during the anthem, he brought attention to a horrible inequality that needs to be fixed. He was a good football player, but decided that wasn’t enough, he felt obligated to give even more. And then he stuck to his guns. He didn’t just say, oh wait, I didn’t mean that and drop it, giving him another opportunity to play football. There’s a bone deep conviction there that I admire.
Colin O’Connor, one of the main characters in The Rainbow Clause, doesn’t initially decide to exercise his “rainbow clause” and come out because he wants to change the world—though he knows it will—he does it because he wants the freedom to date whomever he wants.
What he doesn’t realize at first is that his actions give power to so many people to seek their own freedom to express their sexual preferences. It’s exciting to watch him as he begins to realize this, and begins to come out of his shell, and it hits him what sort of good he could do for people other than himself.
I’ve had more than a few readers approach me and say that a book like The Rainbow Clause could never happen in real life. First off, this always depresses me, and second off, I disagree completely.
We’ve already seen professional athletes use their platform to do more than just play a game. We’ve seen them commit to their causes, even to the detriment of their playing opportunities.
I wrote The Rainbow Clause more than two years ago, but I still feel like the reality is closer than people realize. One day, we’re going to wake up, and the real life version of Colin O’Connor is going to exist.
“Wow,” Colin breathed out, the sheet shifting down his torso as he propped himself up with an elbow. “What a view.”
Even though the ocean and sky and sand were hazy with the golden light of the rising sun, Nick still had trouble taking his eyes off the man next to him.
“Yeah,” Nick said, still staring at Colin. “Fucking fabulous view.”
Colin glanced over and flushed. He rolled over and slid out of bed, bare feet padding on the tile floor as he headed towards the bathroom. “When you look at me that way,” he said, his voice carrying back into the bedroom, “it’s easy to believe I really look as good as you say.”
“You should believe it,” Nick said as Colin returned to bed. Nick knew he needed to use the bathroom, too, at least to brush away his surely horrible morning breath so he could kiss this beautiful man next to him.
Just one problem. Nick glanced at the tile floor with dismay. “Is that as cold as it looks?”
Colin shot him a playful smile and gave him a little shove to the edge of the bed. “Your turn to find out,” he said, and Nick gave a half-hearted smile, expecting to freeze his balls off as he tiptoed to the bathroom. Instead, he found the floor to be shockingly warm against his bare feet.
“Teddy, that rich bastard,” Nick exclaimed as he walked to the bathroom. “Heated floors.”
Nick brushed his teeth and took a piss, returning to bed with warm feet and cold hands, which he proceeded to place right on Colin’s ribcage. But Colin didn’t flinch, only tugged Nick closer, until their limbs were tangled together. Nick shifted up a fraction and hesitated, their eyes locked together and their lips only an inch apart.
“You keep talking about me,” Colin murmured dreamily, his hand smoothing down a wayward tuft of Nick’s hair. “But you’re gorgeous. I stare at you all the damn time.”
It was hard not to notice and impossible not to feel smug that Colin O’Connor spent at least half his waking hours staring at his ass.
A large hand slid around his hip and cupped that ass – but not with the sort of tacky possession that sometimes gave Nick a bad taste in his mouth, but with reverence and a playful affection that made his heart ache.
“I know you notice,” Colin continued, the edge of his lips quirking into a smile. “You’re too nice to call me out on it.”
“What, and make you stop?” Nick asked.
Beth Bolden lives in Portland, Oregon with her supportive husband. She wholly believes in Keeping Portland Weird, but wishes she didn’t have to make the yearly pilgrimage up to Seattle to watch her Boston Red Sox play baseball. She’s a fan of fandoms, and spends too much of her free time on tumblr.
Beth has been writing practically since she learned the alphabet. Unfortunately, her first foray into novel writing, titled Big Bear with Sparkly Earrings, wasn’t a bestseller, but hope springs eternal. She’s published eight novels and two novellas, with Catch Me, the next novel in the Kitchen Gods series, releasing in May 2018.
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