I have so much to be thankful for this week, including the fact that I have a new historical romance release out tomorrow. TALL, DARK AND ROYAL is the second novella in my Renegade Royals Series, which features heroes who are the illegitimate sons of England’s royal dukes. The leader of the Renegade Royals is Sir Dominic Hunter, and his tale began in LOST IN A ROYAL KISS, the first Renegade Royals story. A boy of fifteen, Dominic was devoted to Chloe Steele, his best friend and the person he loved most in the world. But a series of terrible events separated them for many years, and Dominic even feared Chloe was dead. But he never gave up looking for her as he rose through the ranks of the British Intelligence Service, eventually becoming a magistrate and powerful spymaster. Dominic’s search for his lost love played out through the first two books of the series, and now comes to fruition in TALL, DARK AND ROYAL when Dominic and Chloe are finally reunited. Naturally, their reunion isn’t easy, and quite a few obstacles stand in the way of their HEA. Chloe, in particular, has suffered a great deal and she’s forgotten how…

As a writer of fiction, I tend to spend a good deal of time in an imaginary world of my own creation; that seems to come with the territory, and as long as it doesn’t interfere with my functioning in real life (as it did the time I became so wrapped up in mental plotting that I drove myself home from Mobile, Alabama—a distance of about twenty miles—without afterwards recalling how I’d gotten there), it isn’t a problem. Every now and then, though, my two worlds collide, with dangerous (see above) or, more frequently, ludicrous results. One of these occurred during the spring of 2012, when I was writing the Regency-set mystery that eventually became FAMILY PLOT. During the course of researching that book, I’d discovered that digitalis, the medicine still used today to treat heart patients, had existed as early as 1785, and that it is derived from the foxglove plant. I used my new knowledge in plotting the mystery at the center of the book. (This is not a spoiler, as the cause of death is determined very shortly after the discovery of the body.) Meanwhile, in real life, my husband and I had bought a house in…