What do jalapeños, horses, scorpions, snakes, and a man and woman under a star-studded sky all have in common? Texas. West Texas. The setting of my new romantic suspense novel ATTRACTED TO FIRE. Dust off your cowboy hat, tug on your boots, and grab a SIG to team up with Secret Service agents assigned to protect the daughter of the vice president of the United States. It’s hot in West Texas, and I did my best to raise the temperatures. One of the characters is a cook. She prepares the agents’ and protectee’s meals. The problem is she loves jalapeños and does her best to add them to the menu three times a day. She chopped those little peppers into scrambled eggs and grits. Every soup and sandwich had a jalapeño touch. Her specialty was Diablo chicken, and if she could whip up a jalapeño cake or pie, then it was on the dessert tray. That all adds up to heat and heartburn. What’s a West Texas setting without a ranch and a horse? Beautiful quarter horses promise a smooth ride. Nothing’s better than feeling a powerful animal lunging beneath you. Better than any truck or car, and oats are…

Unfortunately, the biggest trick is finishing the book! This year marks the release of my 50th novel (or more, depending on how you count them).  AGAINST THE STORM, Houston cowboy Trace Rawlins’ story, hits bookshelves October 25th. But getting the first book sold wasn’t easy.  I’m sure every author has an interesting tale of how he or she got published.  In my case, my husband Larry had written an Historical novel titled SHADOW OF THE MAST, but he couldn’t get it sold.  I loved the book, which was extremely moving and very romantic. Since I was a voracious reader of bestselling fiction and adored the book, I couldn’t understand why publishers weren’t grabbing it.  (I still have no clue as to how New York publishers actually think.) I decided to see if maybe there was something I could do to polish it a little, maybe help it sell.  By the time I was finished, I was hooked on the idea of writing a book of my own. I chose a Western Romance because I had a western background and MAGNIFICENT PASSAGE was born.  Now both of us had a book to sell, which we tried to do by attending conferences,…

I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. Actually, that’s not 100% true. In my heart, I knew I had one gift, one love, and one hobby that were a three-in-one slam dunk of inner happiness. I nearly flunked out of high school because all I could do was sit there during Calculus class and pen short stories about romance and vampires (which I’d been obsessed with since I’d fallen in love with The Count on Sesame Street at the age of four) to my best friend. I didn’t even care if it irritated the teacher. All that mattered to me was getting to the next tooth-sinking, grip-tightening, desperation-filled moment of maddening lust and writing about it in vivid detail. Obviously, that one gift-given hobby that I loved was bad news; it almost deprived me of a high school diploma, it sure as hell wasn’t going to pay the rent one day. At least that’s what everyone and their poodle was very fond of telling me. So, when I want to college, I started with an empty slate, not really interested in anything. Because of this, I took classes in, basically, everything. I took classes…

I confess, I love creating heroines in my Scottish historical romances who are extraordinarily tough, resilient, and a bit outside the norm for historical romance. My heroines need to be strong in order to stand up to my Highland warrior heroes. These women have lived through difficult times or traumatic events before the opening of the story and are stronger for it. Though Gwyneth, the heroine of MY FIERCE HIGHLANDER, is only twenty-three, she’s well beyond the school-girl stage. Caught in a horrible scandal, she’s forced to leave her home in England and journey to the Highlands of Scotland. There she has a child out of wedlock and marries a man she wishes she’d never seen. Now a widow, a mother and a healer, she’s become a survivor and a resourceful woman any of us might admire… all for the sake of her young son, so that he might have a better life one day. But when she saves the wounded chief of an enemy clan, she risks her life for the first time. To her, this man is worth the risk because she knows he wants peace as she does, and there’s something about him she can’t turn away…

In writing fantasy, you always need to have a villain. If there isn’t one, who does the hero or heroine have to struggle against? If they don’t have anything to make their life interesting, then nothing happens and the reader has no investment in the characters or what happens to them. You can have just about anything as a foil to your heroes; a corrupt government or religious system, a spreading fungus that consumes all it infects, a stampeding herd of polka-dotted dragons. Whatever works. However, the traditional enemy for the fantasy hero has always been the good old villain. The bad guy. Some villains are just utter right bastards. I read one book recently that had a villain in that I loathed. He was evil, he was sadistic, he was vindictive. I’ve rarely written anyone that blatantly nasty.  I wanted to see that guy go down so badly that I couldn’t stop reading the book until I was finished (check out THE KINSHIELD LEGACY by K.C. May). I hated him, but he still had depth to his character. Even villains need more than their villainy to give them shape. I find that the best villains are as deeply complex…

My characters tend to be inter-connected with all kinds of people, because in my own life I’m rarely alone. I have friends, old and new–some live just round the corner, and some miles away, but there aren’t many days that I don’t talk to one of them, seeking advice or a laugh or some company. I have my parents, whom I don’t see nearly enough, though we talk on the phone every day. And I have scattered family–my aunt and my cousins and my cousins’ children, my brother-in-law and my nephews, and all the assorted new people they bring to the party, including the pets. And I’m not even counting my own crew at home here, my kids and my husband and dog. I don’t spend my days in bubble of solitude. So when it comes to creating my characters, I try to make sure they’re not alone, either. I give them each family and friends, whether we ever meet them or not, because people can still have a very strong presence when they’re off the page. And the family and friends of my hero and heroine sometimes can tell me a lot about those two main characters. Often in…

Dante Sabanne is mysterious and powerful, magical, compelling, a true master of the erotic arts and…too sexy for his coat. What??? you ask. Seriously, Jean? Seriously…it was a coat that started all of it, this whole hot, hot, hot, magical, mysterious and moody tale of a brand-new detective out to prove herself…and the expert witness who mesmerizes her, who takes Jace Carroll, a woman who could be another Beckett (Castle rocks, right? Though I only started watching it this fall–love it!) cop to the bone, tough, indomitable, fiercely independent and willing to lean on no one– And turns her every which way but loose. Fascinates her, seduces her, deceives her…brings her to the brink of betraying everything she ever believed in and beyond… Coats, Jean…you were talking about coats. Yes, I was. And still am. This book is unlike any I’ve ever written, a scorching tale of suspense, passion and magic centering on a traveling nightclub that’s more about sex than dancing, a cult steeped in…okay, sex (do we sense a theme here?)…a blood feud, a magical amulet, a bastard heir and the brother who will stop at nothing to destroy him…and the detective whose first case, the simple death…

People have asked me, on many occasions, if I could shapeshift into any animal from the Amoveo clans…which one would I choose? That’s a tough question because it’s kind of like asking which one of your kids is your favorite. In fact, the Amoveo have ten animal clans because I simply couldn’t limit them to one animal because there are too many cool creatures out there to limit it to just one. However, if you held a gun to my head and made me pick one… the honest answer is that it would depend on what heroine I’m writing at the moment. When I was writing UNLEASHED, the Wolf clan was my personal favorite, and that’s why Samantha is a member of the Gray Wolf clan. The truth is that the wolves will probably always be my favorite…well…wolves will be in the top three consistently. Wolves have gotten such a bad rap throughout history and were hunted to the brink of extinction, until not that long ago. They were thought of as murderous thieves, who would swoop in and steal your children in the dead of night. I’ve watched several documentaries about wolves over the years and it’s amazing how…

My brother is extremely proud of the fact that I’m a published author.  Yet, whenever I see him, he inevitably asks me the same question: “So, when are you going to write a real book?”  Nowadays, I just smile my beleaguered-little-sister-smile and move on, but the first couple of times, I took the bait.  “What’s a real book?” I asked him.  “You know, he answered.  “Like John Grisham.” Huh.  John Grisham.  Now, I’ve never personally read John Grisham, but I know he’s extremely successful.  He’s also a former attorney who writes legal thrillers, right?  In other words, commercial fiction that’s thrilling.  I, too, am a former attorney who writes thrilling commercial fiction.  So what’s the huge difference? Two words.  Romance and sex.  My debut paranormal romantic suspense series, the Para-Ops series, is about the FBI’s first special ops team comprised of humans and Otherborn, creatures that include a vampire, werebeast, wraith and mage.  In CHOSEN BY BLOOD, the first book, the team parachutes into North Korea via spy plane to find a stolen antidote.  In CHOSEN BY FATE, the second book, the team travels to Los Angeles to investigate sexual assaults within the feline community.  There’s lots of intrigue, twists…

My favorite mysteries have always had elements of romance, going all the way back to the first Agatha Christie novels I read as a teenager. Obviously the solving of the puzzle–who committed the murder and why–should always be at the forefront of a good mystery novel, but that said . . . I love romantic subplots! A BAD DAY’S WORK HOT, SHOT, AND BOTHERED There’s nothing more fun than characters falling in love. For the first book in my Lilly Hawkins mystery series, A BAD DAY’S WORK, I put my main character through the grueling experience of being chased by villains, becoming a fugitive from the police, and solving a murder. The story unfolds in twenty-four hours and Lilly’s life is temporarily ruined. On the positive side, Lilly’s very bad day leads to several realizations about her life, the people in it, and the mistakes she’s been making. It also enables her to lower her guard and fall in love. For the second book in the series, HOT, SHOT, AND BOTHERED, my biggest challenge was making an existing relationship as much fun as characters meeting for the first time. This is no small task. I’m sure any reader of genre…