Hello, and thanks for inviting me to hang out with you here at Fresh Fiction! Who brought the wine? This is my last stop on a blog tour that’s been devoted entirely to bad dates. We’ve all had them, right? In my new romantic comedy, FRISKY BUSINESS, my heroine endures more than her share. After vowing not to date any more wealthy men, Marley embarks on a quest to date only blue collar guys. While the plan makes it easier for her keep her distance from Will—the quirky, unlikely millionaire she desperately doesn’t want to fall for—it sends Marley down a path of truly terrible dates. But like most romance novels, Marley and Will’s story has a happy ending. I’ve been sharing my personal bad date stories throughout this tour, but now it seems appropriate to wrap things up with a happily ever after of my own. Not long before the release of my debut romantic comedy, Making Waves, I went through a pretty lousy divorce. Um, we’re not to the happy part yet. After the dust settled, I reached out to a male acquaintance who’d been through his own divorce a few years earlier. At first, I asked him…

My upcoming military/paranormal/romantic-suspense-thriller from Sourcebooks, HER PERFECT MATE (Book One of the X-OPS Series) is set within our own world in the current time. In this series, the fictional Department of Covert Operations (DCO for short) is an ultra-secret government agency that pairs the very best soldiers, law enforcement officers, and spies together with shifters—humans that possess special animal attributes, like claws, fangs, fast reflexes, speed, endurance, and heightened senses. Humans and even animals as different from us a mice share a tremendous amount of DNA (something like an 80% match). Each have about the same number of genes, and it’s only a relative small number of genes that make us unique. For example, both humans and mice have a gene for a tail. In mice, it’s turned on. In humans, it’s turned off. This is how shifters exist in the world I created. They simply have certain animal-specific traits that are turned on—like claws, fangs, muscular strength, etc.). These shifters hide themselves in our world, rarely even knowing that others of their kind exist, and doing everything they can to keep their secret from the rest of society. The DCO stumbled over a shifter early in its history and…