Call me crazy, but I love to write alpha males. There’s something a whole lot of fun about a guy who can walk into a room, not speak a word and still let everyone know he’s the big dog. As much as I love alphas, they are challenging. They can be stubborn and arrogant and bossy. Most of the time, the good ones listen to reason. The good ones also march into battle with no idea if they’ll come out and they don’t care. All they want is to fix whatever problem lies in front of them. For me, that strength is the lure of the alpha male. When I began plotting my new Harlequin Intrigue, THE PROSECUTOR, I knew I wanted an alpha as the hero, but I wanted someone…well…different. This hero would be a prosecutor in his early thirties and wouldn’t have a military background. He wouldn’t know how to clean a gun or survive in a jungle for extended periods. But he had to be strong. Strong, but not overly-aggressive. He had to be ambitious, but not to the point where that ambition became a negative. In short, I wanted a guy who craved a courtroom battle…

Today we’re visited by Donna Thorland, author of THE REBEL PIRATE. She’s on a tour and we have an exclusive Q&A with her. What are your top 5 romance/women’s fiction novels of all time? I’m going to cheat a little, because some of my favorite books are part of a series… Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles is actually six books, but every one of them is a non-stop adventure with meticulous historical detail and extra servings of swashbuckling romance. There’s a love story at the center of it that doesn’t resolve until the last page, but when it does, it creates a true partnership of equals. In second place I’d put George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series. Flashman, the bully from Tom Brown’s School Days, is a cad, a rake, and an errant coward and his adventures simultaneously skewer and celebrate Victorian mores and British imperialism. They’re absolutely irresistible . . . except on the rare occasion when Fraser is describing cricket. I’m a Jersey girl at heart, so Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum books deserve a place on the list. I ended up studying Classics in high school because I was fascinated by pre-Hellenistic Egypt but hieroglyphics weren’t on the syllabus, so…

I must admit that I’m a stickler for routines. I find routines to be easy and comforting when everything else is out of control. And between you and me, I usually have so many ideas and characters running through my mind that I’m obviously walking through life a little distracted. 🙂 Thanks to my routines I can get things done that I’d most likely otherwise forget while I’m daydreaming aka working (the benefits of being a writer). I actually get some of my best ideas while doing mundane daily tasks. Talk about your multi-tasking. Well, it just so happened that my writing was starting to take on a pattern of its own where I wrote about nothing but small towns and sexy cowboys. What can I say, I enjoy those stories immensely. Then one day my editor called. She wanted to talk. They were making major changes to Harlequin Romance / Mills & Boon Cherish. She wanted to know how I felt about writing stories with an urban/global/aspirational feel. I will say that my stomach literally quivered at the thought. I had so many small town/cowboy stories floating around in my mind. But there was that lure of trying something…

The River Bend books have been in my head for years, and I’ve been searching for a way to write them. I initially thought of them as a series for Harlequin Special Edition, but when I looked deeper at the ideas I realized they needed more space and more complexity in story-telling than is possible in a series romance novel of less than 60,000 words. When I was invited to write for The Tule Group and Montana Born Books, it was so exciting to know that at last I’d found a home for these stories. Each of them centers around what happened on prom night in Marietta eighteen years ago,1996, and in the shorter novella that sets up the series we see that night from two more perspectives, those of high school teacher Kate and sheriff Harrison. Prom night is such an impossibly huge event in the mind of so many American high school kids. They hang so many expectations on it – that it’s going to be the best night of their lives, that it’s going to be the start of wonderful love, the launch of real life. For a lot of eighteen-year-olds, I suspect that prom night fizzles…

The River Bend books have been in my head for years, and I’ve been searching for a way to write them. I initially thought of them as a series for Harlequin Special Edition, but when I looked deeper at the ideas I realized they needed more space and more complexity in story-telling than is possible in a series romance novel of less than 60,000 words. When I was invited to write for The Tule Group and Montana Born Books, it was so exciting to know that at last I’d found a home for these stories. Each of them centers around what happened on prom night in Marietta eighteen years ago,1996, and in the shorter novella that sets up the series we see that night from two more perspectives, those of high school teacher Kate and sheriff Harrison. Prom night is such an impossibly huge event in the mind of so many American high school kids. They hang so many expectations on it – that it’s going to be the best night of their lives, that it’s going to be the start of wonderful love, the launch of real life. For a lot of eighteen-year-olds, I suspect that prom night fizzles…

Chief Warrant Officer 4 Sarah Benson, US Army, Medevac pilot, has fallen in love with Ethan Quinn. He’s a US Navy SEAL stationed at FOB (forward operating base) Bravo thirty miles from the Afghan-Pak (Pakistan) border. If you have read the first book, RISK TAKER, Harlequin Romantic Suspense, February, 2014, then you are now reading the sequel. These two characters were seminal for me in many ways. Each had a powerful story to tell in their own right. And then, to put them together in the war and combat environment in Afghanistan, was to test every resolve they owned and believed in. Ethan sees beneath Sarah’s courageous exterior of a Medevac pilot who will not leave those in jeopardy, to bleed out. She was never rescued in the hellish foster home she grew up in until age twelve. Because she was never saved, Sarah has made it her life mission to save others, never wanting them to know what it feels like to survive terror and abuse. He is able to reach her through is poems that he writes and leaves for her at her tent. And he’s the only male Sarah has ever, truly trusted. And they are deeply…

Awk-ward! While shopping in the grocery store, have you ever tried to avoid an unwanted conversation with someone you know by diving behind a display of potato chips? You attempt to shrink down to half your size while hoping your acquaintance keeps walking and doesn’t notice the quivering display of salty goodness concealing your location. You hold your breath. Have they had time to round the end of the isle and disappear into the frozen food department? The seconds tick past as your hands begin to sweat beneath your white-knuckled grasp on the shopping cart. You finally stand and peer around the tower of chips only to see your acquaintance stopped to investigate a table of seasonal cookies from the bakery. They turn, somehow aware of your gaze on their back. Their eyes widen with surprise. There’s nowhere to run. It’s too late to slip away unnoticed. Then comes the drawn out, “Hi—iii. What are you doing here?” There’s no escape, you’re in an uncomfortable conversation. At one point or another, most people have been there. Maybe not there, hiding behind a stack of potato chips, but there in life in some fashion. From the long-winded lady who will talk…

If You Hear Her, 2012 Booksellers Best Winner, is on sale for .99 until March 9th. Set in a small, sleepy southern town, If You Hear Her is the first in Shiloh Walker’s Ash Trilogy.  You can read more at her website or visit the iBooks store, Kindle store, Nook store or Kobo to pick up your copy today.

My readers wasted no time telling me they loved Thunder Point – the sales were insane! All three original Thunder Point novels, THE WANDERER, THE NEWCOMER and THE HERO were #1! I got the message loud and clear – they want more. Well, it’s going to be another exciting year in Thunder Point, beginning with THE CHANCE on February 25. Do opposites attract? Sometimes they do. Or maybe I should say, on some issues couples are as different as night and day. Looking at my own marriage, there are times my husband and I come up with the same idea at the same time – it can be spooky. Yet on some important points we couldn’t be more different. For example, if the temperature is over 75 degrees, I melt. I like to sit up late and read and I think I enjoy my bed most after six a.m. So who did I marry? A guy who is bundled up in summer, goes to bed at eight p.m. and is up before the roosters! I like the house well lit and he walks around behind me turning off lights and turning up the temperature. But for some mysterious reason it…

My name is Nicolette Day, and I’m addicted to romance. As far back as I can remember, I have been a lover of books. Instead of watching cartoons on Saturday mornings, my mother would read me J.R. Tolkein, and Shel Silverstein. Robert Frost and Edgar Allen Poe. Living in a house with three other siblings, I loved the escape it gave me. I loved traveling to other worlds without ever having to leave my bedroom. But there came a moment that I wanted something more between the pages of my stories. I wanted romance! And finally I read my first book boyfriend, in the form of a Christopher Pike YA thriller. And that book boyfriend broke my heart. In true Christopher Pike fashion, the fictional boy I’d fallen for ended up being the killer. But I forgave, and moved on to the next book. Vampire or human, hobbit or wherewolf, I adored them all. I adored falling in love over and over again as the characters I read did. The heart break, the butterflies, the kisses, and even the dirty talkers. They all have a special place in my heart and give me something I crave as a reader. Eventually,…