That’s the question I wanted to ask in my new book for Carina Press, named, appropriately, LEARNING TO TRUST. But in order to make that question a really valid one, I needed to ratchet up the tension and the stakes. I started by making my heroine a flawed human being. I don’t know about you, but it’s the flawed ones I root for most. Lina started life with everything—money, privilege, a gilded lifestyle, but underneath her life was empty. Then she found a friend, Byron Brantley, and then together, they found drugs. When their families threaten to force them into rehab, they run away, and end up in Rome. When the story starts, Lina has lost touch with Byron, and is working in Naples as a waitress. She’s off drugs for good, and is making herself a new life in this dangerous city. Jonathan Brantley comes to Naples to find out what is left of his brother. He has said goodbye to him years ago, once Byron made clear he wasn’t giving up the drugs. Most families of addicts know that at some stage they have to make the decision to do something drastic. A drug addict can’t give up…

Surgical complications happen to everyone else, not to cosmically blessed people who work for the hospital where they’re having the surgery done. At least that’s what I thought before I woke up from elbow surgery with a wrist as limp as a month-old celery stalk. I went back to sleep immediately. I woke-up to a nightmare. I went in for surgery to repair a Nirschl Lesion (tennis elbow) and ended up with a stretched radial nerve. I could concentrate as hard as I wanted, but I couldn’t lift a finger on my right hand. Bad and double bad: Bad because I did everything with my right hand. Double bad because my left hand was about as useful as my pinky toe. My arm was numb. I felt, but not in the tactile sense. I felt almost every emotion in the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. I got stuck in “denial” and never made it to acceptance. I had a busy healthcare marketing career where I spent seventy percent of my time typing and the other thirty percent on the phone or in meetings. My first published novel, FINDING HER PERFECT MASTER, was just released. I…

It’s Black Friday. If you’re like me, you’ve been out shopping in the predawn hours. Fighting crowds. Enjoying the holiday atmosphere. Trying to get a bargain. Now you’ve arrived home with your packages, boxes, and bags and are feeling more like the Grinch than Santa Claus. There’s still so much to do—eat the rest of the leftover turkey and pumpkin pie, put away the fall decorations, pull out the Christmas decorations, finish your Christmas shopping, wrap it up, mail it, take a family photo for your Christmas card, make out your cards, get them mailed, put up the tree  . . . Right about now you probably feel stressed out and ready to scream. There’s too much to do and too little time to do it. And now it’s started to snow. Which will make travel nearly impossible, especially if you live in a city like Seattle, where I do, and they only have one snowplow and it never seems to make it to your street. At least not until that beautiful dusting of snow has turned into compact ice. What you really need is to escape into a wonderful romance novel. I have just the sunny destination for you—THE…

I’ve been on road for the past few weeks, traveling from New York to Phoenix, Houston to Miami. Book tours are like no other part of being a writer. Generally speaking, novelists spend their time at home, noses buried in research notebooks, laptops threatening to become physically attached to them, rarely speaking except to the food delivery guy, with whom they have a love/hate relationship. Love because he brings food. Hate because he can’t remove the subsequent empty boxes that grow to fort-like heights as deadlines approach. There are lots of wonderful things about writing. You can work in pajamas. You don’t have to dig your car out of snow drifts to get to the office on time after a blizzard. You get to tell stories that turn out exactly how you want them to. But it’s isolating work. Sure, sometimes you talk plot points through with your editor, spouse, or friend. But for the most part, you work in your head. And then your new book comes out and everything changes. You head out on tour. Yes there are early flights (I admit that I could have used a few more hours of sleep when the car picked me…

It’s almost Thanksgiving and I love the holidays. I have a big reason to celebrate this year with the release of first THE LEGEND OF MICHAEL and now THE STORM THAT IS STERLING. I was very excited to get my first Booklist review as well! Here is what they had to say: The exciting Zodius futuristic suspense series features soldiers enhanced by a GTECH secret military experiment. Sterling Jeter, who is assigned to guard Rebecca Burns, the scientist working on an antidote for the highly addictive and fatal drug ICE. But Rebecca is also the high-school dream Sterling was never able to realize. She has cancer and tangling with bad guys who want her science skills for their ends has left her an ICE addict, too. She wants to take advantage of her time left with Sterling, while Sterling wants to protect her. As danger mounts, they try to sort out who is trustworthy. The GTECH and science details can best be followed with the help of the index, but they do not overwhelm the appealing characters or action. Jones’ suspense truly sizzles with an energy similar to FBI tales with a paranormal twist by Julie Garwood or Suzanne Brockmann….

A couple days ago, I redesigned my banner for my website and sent it to my son who designed my website.  I loved what I did but knew he’d find fault.  After all, he is a programmer, which makes pleasing his sensibilities with my creativity nearly impossible.  And <sigh>, I was right.  He vetoed most of what I did. I have to wonder what happened to that creative little boy who along with his younger sister helped me discover my own creative writing talent. You see, I was not always a writer, unlike so many authors who say they’ve always loved writing.  Me?  I never wanted to write anything, except maybe chatty letters to friends or my great-grandmother (who loved receiving mail) or notes to pals in class.  Okay, I’ve dated myself here because I grew up without computers, emails, social media or text messages! I also absolutely hated writing, did not excel in English and thought history the most boring subject on earth!  So it’s rather strange and ironic that not only am I a writer but I’ve published 12 historical romances.  Well, back to my beginnings. When my son was in grade school, his teachers were very impressed…

It was the name of your site that  gave me the inspiration for this blog.  I’ve been rather  overdone by blogging recently – my own blog, the I heart Presents blog – a wonderful – but demanding  – great big Blog Tour  that too in  XX blogs, all needing new and interesting posts. (Can you tell that I’ve had a new book out?) I’ve been talking to so many people all over the world  and it’s been stretching me to think up new and different things to say at each stop. This book I’ve written – THE RETURN OF THE STRANGER –  is a brand new story to me and yet in many ways it’s one of the oldest books in my experience of reading romantic fiction. It’s  a modern romance – and yet it’s a story that is timeless and has echoes for so many through the years. Confused? Well let me explain. THE RETURN OF THE STRANGER is part of a mini series of four books that reflect and rework the themes of some of the most memorable stories in romantic fiction of all time. It was part of the mini-series THE POWERFUL and THE PURE based on…

You know what the biggest challenge of a release-month blog tour is? Yep, you’re right—finding fresh topics. Between my own scheduling and my publicists, I’m at somewhere around 3 dozen blogs between November 1 and December 31. What’s a great strategy for surviving the challenge? Stealing other people’s stories. A couple of weeks ago, my mother-in-law was getting ready for work when her cat, Angel, wanted to play. She brought Mom the little felt toy mouse they play fetch with and cried at her until, exasperated, Mom picked it up by the tail and tossed it across the room, into the dining room. Angel just sat and stared at her. Fast forward to the end of the day. Mom comes home from work, and sees the mouse lying in the dining room still. But she looks closely, and it’s not the little felt toy mouse. It’s a real mouse. A real, dead mouse. Cue grossout. Poor Angel, she was so proud, and totally dissed. Their other, really fat, lazy cat, Charlie, went after another little mouse that evening. My nephew got it out from under the washing machine while my mother-in-law waited in the bedroom. I have three cats, but…

Philip Drake has the look of a man acutely aware of his surroundings. He emanates a sort of restless energy, not of the nervous variety, but of a man accustomed to taking charge of those around him.  He regards me first assessingly, and then flashes a raffish smile that makes my pulse speed up, but then Philip, even at his worst, has always had that effect on me. “So, Miss Lee,” he says, “To what do I owe the honor of this interview?” “It seems there are many misperceptions about you, my lord-” “Philip, please.” He meets me with his intense, dark gaze and then smiles warmly. “I am, after all, indebted to you for my very existence.” “Thank you.”  I return the smile and try to suppress my rising color. “I had hoped we could chat briefly.” He nods, relaxes in his chair, and crosses a booted ankle over his knee. “Philip, when readers were first introduced to you in THE HIGHEST STAKES as a brother-in-arms and boon companion to Robert Devington,  many were shocked  and dare I say even repulsed, by your selfish opportunism.” “Ouch.”Philip winces and then laughs a brief, harsh sound.  “I confess I had imagined…

I didn’t expect to be writing novels about the unjust persecution of misunderstood monarchs. It sort of just…happened. I blame THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL. I loved that story as a girl; I loved the 1934 movie with Leslie Howard and Merle Oberon on the late-night movies, and I loved the made-for-TV movie in the 80s with Anthony Andrews and Jane Seymour, and I loved the 90s version with Richard E. Grant and Elizabeth McGovern that I recently stumbled upon on Netflix. (And just about died of swoonage at the line Grant delivers to McGovern at the end, when Sir Percy realizes he’s in love with his wife; as they’re going in for the romantic final kiss, she says something that ends with “…in a word, marriage,” and he replies in his fabulously perfect foppish drawl, “Marriage i’n’t a word, it’s a sentence.”) Okay, so maybe that says more about how I have a thing for somewhat effeminate men with foppish drawls, but that’s a story for another time. It was while watching THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL that I had this twinge of guilt: I was rooting for the French aristocracy. Shouldn’t I have been on the side of the poor and oppressed?…