Extra Type: Author Notes

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I was secretly calling this duet the Brother’s Grim even before my editor asked if I could give it a Beauty and the Beast spin, but I was so happy to!

Javiero was supposed to be the ‘good’ brother. The one who was honourable and devoted to his family and the legitimate heir. His mother was briefly married to Javiero’s father, Niko, until she learned that Niko’s mistress was pregnant with Val from A Hidden Heir to Redeem Him. Val, for all his darkness, is fallen angel beautiful. Javiero was always compared to his brother and found wanting in the looks department. Now not even ruggedly handsome. He’s disfigured and people are keeping their children away from him.

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Scarlett is a beauty, inside and out, but she doesn’t feel it. She had a rough childhood and she has worked really hard to help her family, but they still behave in ways that make her feel her background is a blight on her character. Between that and the move to Spain and the new baby, she catches a bad case of the baby blues and feels even worse about herself.

I wanted to include postpartum depression because it’s real. It happens to lots of women. If you or someone you know is struggling as a new mom, you can read more about postpartum depression here.

I won’t spoil the end, but I will say that Scarlett does help break the spell that has left Javiero embittered most of his life. I hope you enjoy their story!

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When I first conceived of this–conceived. Ha!–I knew I wanted a pair of heroes who were brothers, but rivals. They shared a father, but had had some kind of falling out with him. Somehow, that father had found out both of these men had impregnated women. He secretly brought the heroines to live with him and made their babies his heirs. I knew the heroes would discover this after their father’s death. I thought maybe the heroins would be his housekeeper and his nurse or something.

When Kiara hit the page, however, she came with paint brushes and canvases and dreams. After a brief affair with Val (who up and got married shortly after their night together) she was staring at giving up her artistic aspirations because she was pregnant. Enter Niko. He gave this orphan the security she longed for, a limitless future for her child, and a studio to call her own. All she had to do was wait until he died before telling Val he was a father.

It was an offer she couldn’t resist!

Val, however, has good reasons to hold a grudge against his father and when Niko dies, and he learns that Kiara kept his child secret for three years, he isn’t prepared to forgive easily. Did I mention he’s the illegitimate brother and and determined to live down to his label of ‘bastard’?

Kiara has a challenge on her hands, but fortunately, she’s adept at making a masterpiece out of raw materials.

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Pia has been a very unassuming character in the back of my mind a long time. She turned up at her brother’s wedding in The Consequence He Must Claim, but didn’t even have any lines. I got a little more serious about giving her a story when I wrote her other brother’s romance, The Maid’s Spanish Secret, but she was still firmly off the page.

I didn’t realize until I finally tried to write her story that she’s a massive introvert. She grew up in a family of scientists and is one herself, hates that her mother wants her to be an accomplished hostess, and most of all feels a tremendous duty to save the family reputation after her brother’s blow it with their secret baby scandals.

I wasn’t sure where I would go with her story, but at the end of her brother’s book, I made reference to a ball. I figured made it a masked ball and Pia–for once–feels emboldened. When she has the opportunity to take a selfish hour with an intriguing man, she does.

And along comes scandal number three for the family. Wait, there’s more. Not only does she not know the name of her lover, when she does find him, he’s the most inappropriate man for a family trying to stay this side of respectable.

Angelo, however, is the most perfect man for her. Of course, it takes roughly two hundred pages for them to figure that out, but I hope you enjoy watching how they get there.

Note: All of my books stand alone, but if you like to read connected books in order, these ones go like this:

1. The Marriage He Must Keep (Baby Swap #1)
2. The Consequence He Must Claim (Baby Swap #2)
3. The Maid’s Spanish Secret
4. Bound by Their Nine-Month Scandal

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When I wrote A Virgin to Redeem the Billionaire, I needed Kaine to have a grudge against Gisella. Initially, I thought her cousin was merely inept, but as I wrote that book and its follow up, Innocent’s Nine Month Scandal, I fell in love with the family. Some were quirky, but everyone was smart and very loyal to the family name.

Ben was still my pseudo villain, but his grand error in judgment was soon revealed to be that he had trusted the wrong person. As I wrote him, I set him up to have his own story one day, not really knowing who that person was.

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Then, not long after both books in the duet wrapped, my editor asked if I was interested in writing a free online read that tied in with the duet.

Ben was the obvious choice, but then I had to figure out exactly who had double-crossed him and how and why and, oh yeah. What if she’s pregnant?

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It’s a lot to fit into a fast-paced, twenty-chapter, serialized story, but more than one reader has asked me if Ben has his own story and yes! You can find it at Harlequin.com in their online reads section.

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Shortly after my baby swap duet came out, I began getting inquiries about Rico, the brother of Cesar from The Consequence He Must Claim. Would he have his own story?

I wanted him to. Rico lurked around the back of my mind, waiting for the right heroine to show up. Also, even though he came from the same emotionally sterile family that made Cesar such a remote man, Rico didn’t have any unresolved anger that needed fifty thousand words and the love of his life to get over.

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Until I realized that he dutifully married and was betrayed. In fact, everyone thinks he suffered a terrible loss when what he’s actually doing is protecting a terrible secret. He’s trying to shake that bitterness when he discovers he has a daughter by a very brief affair with his mother’s former housemaid.

I hope you love Rico’s journey falling for Poppy. Look for the final Montero sibling, Pia, which should come out late 2019 or early 2020.

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My son, Sam, took a two-year computer programming class at British Columbia Institute of Technology. Essentially, they cram four years of learning into two. The course is widely known to be intensive and gruelling and generally the only thing a student does–eating and sleeping are luxuries. Calling home, even for money, hardly ever happened.

But on one of our rare calls, he mentioned a classmate, Luli. I fell in love with her name and said, “I might steal that for a heroine.” He said, “It’s actually Lucrecia.” I said, “Even better, but what kind of name is it?” He said her family was from Venezuela and I thought that was intriguing enough to keep it.

I later had the good fortune to meet real-life Luli. She’s lovely and no, they’re not dating. Strictly comrades in computer programming, but I have it on good authority–Sam–that she’s a really great coder.

I accidentally lifted Luli’s vocation of computer programming for my fictional Luli. I needed my Luli to develop a skill while she’s trapped for years with Gabriel’s rich, eccentric grandmother, something that would allow her to be a pain in Gabriel’s behind. Luli locks him out of his own software–which makes him mad, but secretly appeals to the nerd in him. He wants to unravel what she’s done.

I have no idea if my description of Luli’s hacking holds water. My son is generous with his time if I have research questions, but I’ll be honest. I don’t want to say, “I want this and this and this to happen” and hear him go, “Yeah, Mom, that can’t happen.” Ignorance is very much bliss! So if you happen to know something about computer programming and read this book and roll your eyes at the artistic license I’ve taken, that’s all on me. Sam and real-life Luli are innocent bystanders.

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At one point, I thought this story might be a cross-over between my Love in Montana series and Blue Spruce Lodge. I thought Petra and Flynn would wind up at Blue Spruce Lodge, meet Skye, and plan a ‘real’ wedding for Trigg and Wren, who had a courthouse marriage in In Too Deep. (This cross-over may yet happen!)

For a number of reasons, this turned into a much sweeter stand-alone Christmas story. My parents were actually staying with us when I took a call from my publisher and made the decision to change directions. Mom and Dad had come to us as a precaution one night in May. They’d been asked to leave their house in case the river breeched the dyke beside their house.

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The next morning, their house was under twelve feet of water. They wound up staying with us for two months until they were able to get back in. Mom helped me brainstorm titles for this book and cooked meals so I could get it written. Their being here imbued Wedding at Mistletoe Chalet with some extra family love. I hope you can feel it!

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We happened to be in the car with my daughter and her boyfriend while they were visiting us for Christmas 2017. I said to my daughter, “I need to brainstorm a duet idea. I was thinking of two heroes who are rivals for some reason and I want the heroines to be cousins, but that’s all I have.”

After further discussion, Delainey said, “What comes in twos? How about something with a pair of earrings?”

When it comes to brainstorming, I trust my gut and my gut immediately loved this idea! I knew the heirloom earrings had been separated somehow and the cousins are trying to reunite them. But why? And how did the heroes wind up fighting over them?

I decided fairly quickly that the earrings had belonged to the heroines’ grandmother. She sold one in Hungary to come to America and sold the other when she got to New York, to start her new life. Her granddaughters, Gisella and Rozalia, want to buy them back for her. They’ve been searching for years.

In Book One, Gisella learns the New York earring is going up for auction. She arrives to bid on it only to learn Kaine has bought the entire estate and all its contents in one fell swoop! After all these years, she’s been denied.

So has Viktor, the hero of Book Two. This is how the men become rivals. Kaine isn’t interested in picking a fight with Viktor, but he can’t let go of the earring he now possesses. It’s leverage against Gisella and he has a score to settle with her family.

Does he score with Gisella? I’ll let you read the book and find out.

Fun fact! Initially this was going to be titled A Virgin for the Billionaire’s Revenge, but has since been changed to A Virgin to Redeem the Billionaire.

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You may want to read my notes on A Virgin to Redeem the Billionaire for how the idea for this duet came about.

After writing Book One, where Gisella loses one earring to Kaine, I now had to conjure a story for Rozalia, the mousier cousin, who winds up in Hungary, confronting rich, titled, gorgeous Viktor Rohan–who thinks the earrings were stolen, not gifted to her grandmother as Rozalia has always believed.

In some ways, writing the second of a linked book is easier than the first. A lot of the world-building is done. I knew a lot about Rozi’s family and back story. I knew certain things had to happen right away. For example, in Book One, Gisella takes a call from Rozi that is quite dramatic. I don’t want to spoil it, but I knew all the things that had to happen leading up to her making that call, so the first half of the book wrote itself.

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Then. It. Stalled.

Fortunately, I was able to lean on my other child, Sam. He happened to call when I was groaning about my story hitting a rough patch. I said, “They’re in a mountain cabin, there’s a village in the distance. I’m not sure if they should go on a date or what. Usually dates are glamorous affairs.”

He said, “What if there’s a wedding or celebration in the village. There are lights in the trees and music playing and they go dancing.”

My hero! I wrote the scene and, sadly, several rewrites later, deleted it, but it got me writing when I was stuck. Rozi soon has more to worry about than whether she’ll take an earring home. She might be carrying the next Rohan heir!

As for who possesses the earrings in the end? I’ll let you read the books to find out.

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We happened to be in the car with my daughter and her boyfriend while they were visiting us for Christmas 2017. I said to my daughter, “I need to brainstorm a duet idea. I was thinking of two heroes who are rivals for some reason and I want the heroines to be cousins, but that’s all I have.”

After further discussion, Delainey said, “What comes in twos? How about something with a pair of earrings?”

When it comes to brainstorming, I trust my gut and my gut immediately loved this idea! I knew the heirloom earrings had been separated somehow and the cousins are trying to reunite them. But why? And how did the heroes wind up fighting over them?

I decided fairly quickly that the earrings had belonged to the heroines’ grandmother. She sold one in Hungary to come to America and sold the other when she got to New York, to start her new life. Her granddaughters, Gisella and Rozalia, want to buy them back for her. They’ve been searching for years.

In Book One, Gisella learns the New York earring is going up for auction. She arrives to bid on it only to learn Kaine has bought the entire estate and all its contents in one fell swoop! After all these years, she’s been denied.

So has Viktor, the hero of Book Two. This is how the men become rivals. Kaine isn’t interested in picking a fight with Viktor, but he can’t let go of the earring he now possesses. It’s leverage against Gisella and he has a score to settle with her family.

Does he score with Gisella? I’ll let you read the book and find out.