The middle of July in Arizona means it’s been steadily creeping over a hundred degrees for the last two months. What better time to dive into a book that’s set in the snowy winter wilderness of far northwestern Canada? While a lot of you live in areas of the country where you’ve got to shovel snow and de-ice your windshield, I assure you, after twenty-plus years of living in Arizona, I’d trade in a heartbeat! My heroine, Cecily Knight, went a step further. After getting out of the Marine Corps, she moved up to the middle of nowhere, Canada, so far outside the little town of Pinelake that she uses a small plane to do her grocery shopping. Everyday chores for her are a matter of life and death. She has to have enough fuel and firewood to stay warm through the winter. Every time she goes out, she’s surrounded by threats, from falling and breaking her ankle to encountering a bear face-to-face. Living under a constant challenge is her coping mechanism. By surviving, she proves that she’s strong enough to get through another day without anything bad happening to her or anyone else around her. It’s not a healthy…

Part one of bestselling erotic romance author Cynthia Sax’s new novella series, SINFUL REWARDS, released today, and we at Fresh Fiction had the pleasure of chatting with Cynthia about all the steamy details. Thanks for joining us, Cynthia! Was it difficult to transition out of writing The Seen Trilogy and into your new novella series, Sinful Rewards? Cynthia: It is always difficult to leave a beloved world and say goodbye to characters I adore. A couple of things helped me with this transition. We change settings, moving from LA in the The Seen Trilogy to Chicago in Sinful Rewards. I love both of these cities but they are VERY different, having a completely different feel and rhythm. I also wrote a couple of delicious SciFi erotic romances between the two series. That was a fun palette cleanser. Billionaires are a hot topic in erotic literature. As a writer, what draws you to the billionaires for your leading men? Cynthia: For me, billionaire is a short form for alpha of the business world. What this label communicates is the hero is successful and (usually) the boss. He has reached the top of his game (likely expecting that this achievement would fix…

When I began to think about the title for the third book of my medieval serial novel, Time Enough to Love, I had a rather difficult time coming up with one that continued in line with the first two novellas, BETROTHAL and BETRAYAL.  Those titles came immediately to mind because the words exactly explained the plots of the books. The final installment, however, was more complex, with more complications. So trying to find a word that began with “Be” became rather daunting. I grabbed a dictionary and went down the columns of “be” words.  It wasn’t a pleasant experience, because the longer I looked, the more I believed I would never come up with a title that would continue the alliteration of the first two and reflect the meaning of the book itself.  When I arrived at “beleaguered” it took me a second to think about it.  It was longer than the other two, it didn’t roll off the tongue as easily as they did, and it didn’t really scream romance novel.  But it did begin with “be” and the definition fit the book perfectly. Beleaguered, according to the Oxford Dictionaries, means “besieged, lay siege to, under attack,” and “hard…