A Season of Seduction (49 page)

After that night, it was a piece of cake to write the sisters—Maddie, Tara, and Chloe—with their claws barely sheathed, resentment and affection competing for equal measure.

All I had left to do then was find the three sexy guys who could handle them.

It just so happened that, at the time, my neighbor was having an addition put on her house. For six glorious weeks, there were a bunch of guys hanging off the roof and the walls, in a perfect line of sight from my office.

Which is really my deck.

So I sat in the sun and wrote while in the background cute, young, sweaty guys hammered and sawed and, in general, made my day.

And on some days, they even took off their shirts. Those were my favorite days of all. But I digress…

I was working very hard, planning out conflicts and plot pacing and trying to nail down my hero. And given what I was looking at for inspiration, it shouldn’t be any surprise at all that the hero for this first book in the Lucky Harbor series, SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE (on sale now), turned out to be a master carpenter.

And a very sexy one at that.

I’m actually writing book two right now. I keep going out on the deck, sitting and patiently waiting, but my neighbor hasn’t hired any more sexy carpenters. Darn it.

Enjoy!

www.jillshalvis.com

From the desk of Jennifer Haymore

Dear Reader,

When Jack Fulton, the hero of A SEASON OF SEDUCTION first entered my office to ask me to write his story, I was a little confused about his motives.

“Okay.” I stared at him dubiously. “From what you’ve said, it sounds like you met a woman and fell in love. What’s the issue here?” Honestly, I couldn’t figure out why he’d come to me in the first place. I’m here to write about characters with real, serious problems, and his seemed straightforward enough. Actually it didn’t seem like a problem at all.

“For one thing, she’s the sister of a duke, and I’m a sailor.”

Hmmm… a Cinderella story in reverse. There might be something here. Yet…

Frowning, I skimmed through the application he’d laid on my desk. While I had to admit that when he’d walked in I’d gotten a brief vision of the rolling sea, the guy didn’t comport himself like a salty seaman at all. I tapped the papers. “Says here you’re from a distinguished family. Your father and brother both sit in Parliament. You’re a gentleman.”

Fulton sighed. “By blood, maybe.”

“Hmm.” I know how thick bloodlines ran in nineteenth-century England. The fact that he was a gentleman from a reputable, wealthy family with noble roots would go far in aiding his bid for a duke’s sister. If he were a chimney sweep or something, it might be different. But I didn’t feel this was quite enough.

He leaned forward in his chair. “Lady Rebecca doesn’t trust anyone. She doesn’t trust me. And because of that, she pushes me away.”

“Why doesn’t she trust anyone?” I asked.

“Because of her previous husband.”

“What about him?”

A muscle twitched in Fulton’s jaw, and his hands gripped the chair arms so tightly I could see his knuckles whitening. “William Fisk was a bastard,” he gritted out. “He didn’t love her. He married her for her status and her money. He planned to steal it all away from her.”

I had to agree, this Fisk dude was a jerk. Poor Lady Rebecca. Still, I couldn’t see the relevance of any of this. I shook my head. “Look, I don’t think this is the story for me. The lady might have some issues with trust, but don’t we all? If she loves you and you love her, you can work it out. I guarantee it.”

Clearly agitated, Fulton thrust a hand through his brown, sun-streaked hair. He rose and began pacing my tiny office, from one end to the other and back again. I watched him patiently, but secretly hoped he would leave soon. I had a lot of work to do.

Finally, he spun around, pinning me with dark eyes. “You don’t understand.”

I shrugged. The issue seemed clear enough to me.

“There’s a problem. An insurmountable problem.” He stalked toward me, placed his hands flat on my mahogany desk, and leaned forward until his nose was an inch from my own.

“You see,” he began, his voice quiet but with an edge of something hard and brittle, like a thin sheet of glass about to shatter. “She shouldn’t trust me. She shouldn’t believe a word I say.”

“Why’s that?” I murmured, staring up into his narrowed, dark eyes.

“Because,” he said, very, very quietly, “my motives when it comes to Lady Rebecca Fisk are exactly the same as her first husband’s.”

Once I heard that, I was hooked. I knew I had to take this story on. I invited Fulton back into his chair, and after some arduous work and heavy arguing, we finally hammered out the fair solution to his problem, and A SEASON OF SEDUCTION was born.

Please come visit me at my website,
www.jennifer haymore.com
, where you can share your thoughts about my books, sign up for my newsletter and some fun freebies, and read more about the characters from A SEASON OF SEDUCTION.

From the desk of Annie Solomon

Dear Reader,

One of the most interesting things I did for TWO LETHAL LIES (on sale now) was the research. Normally, I don’t enjoy that part of the writing process, but I had some interesting experiences with this book.

In one scene, for example, I wanted my heroine, Neesy, to disable a car. But she had to do it quickly—before the bad guys could get her—without tools, and in a way that could just as easily be reversed so the car would start once the evil ones were gone. Sound easy? Well, the car was a 1959 Oldsmobile, and I couldn’t find any reliable source, online or off, who could help. So I went to the only experts I knew: Click and Clack, the Tappet brothers from the radio show Car Talk. We had a great time on the air, and they came up with a good solution. But after all that? The scene was cut!

Although the Net didn’t help with that problem, it was a godsend for others. When I decided to do a section of the book at Disney World, I was a little nervous. I’d been to the park once, but it was years ago; I had only vague memories. But when I went online to see what information I could find, I was amazed. I discovered not only maps and the pictures from the Disney site, but lots of videos taken by visitors themselves, which would be much closer to the experience of my characters. And then I hit the jackpot—a mini-documentary about the secret tunnels beneath the park. That shaped the entire section. And it was so cool to write about something most people don’t know.

I found lots of other things that helped me set the story of Mitch, his daughter Julia, and his love, Neesy, in reality. The Drake Hotel is a well-known hotel in Chicago—and Princess Diana really did stay there! Hanover House in New York City is based on the Sloan Mansion, a turn-of-the-century home with fourteen-foot ceilings and seventeen bathrooms. I put Roger Carrick in the Omaha-Nebraska section of the FBI so I could write about Muscatine, the small town on the Mississippi that I visited last year. I met lots of great folks and had a wonderful time. And it’s true, as Roger says—corn is everywhere.

If you’d like to see pictures of the places I’ve been, watch the videos, hear me on the radio—even take a gander at the scene that bit the dust—it’s all on my website,
www.anniesolomon.com
. Stop by, check it out, and say hello. I’d love to hear from you!

Happy Reading!