Three Kisses Trilogy #2 January 2011 On Sale: January 4, 2011 Featuring: Stevie Baci; Jacques Parini 304 pages ISBN: 0425239179 EAN: 9780425239179 Paperback $7.99 Add to Wish List Romance Contemporary Buy at Amazon.com Then He Kissed Me by Christie Ridgway What could Tanti Baci’s tomboy have in common with a royal prince? Oh, that… The three Baci sisters are on a mission to save the family winery by transforming it into a wedding destination. When Stevie Baci playfully names her own side business Napa Princess Limousine, she never dreams she’ll be driving a real prince around Napa Valley. Jacques Parini, aka “Jack”, is looking to expand his family’s wine interests. But after kissing Stevie, he finds this California girl in a black chauffeur’s hat does more than drive him crazy. A fun addition to the romantic Three Kisses trilogy. Excerpt “So who’s the other guy?” Stevie’s friend Mari asked, as she slid into the passenger seat of the waiting limousine. “Uh . . . other guy?” “Tall, dark, and dashing?” her friend qualified. “Don’t tell me you didn’t notice.” She’d noticed. From the moment he’d stepped out of the resort. But tall, dark, and dashing didn’t make up for rich,…

I’ve been hearing a lot from readers about the secondary story in my latest contemporary romance, CRUSH ON YOU. Gil Marino and Clare Knowles are best friends and have been so since childhood. Unlikely friends, on the face of it, as he was the school jock and she was the geeky girl who was treasurer of the Science Fiction Society. But he attended every one of her birthday parties, starting when the invitations came with Barbie on front through her Sweet Sixteen when he was the shy girl’s support and escort. When she gets engaged and asks him to be the “Man of Honor,” what’s a buddy to do? Except Gil doesn’t feel like her buddy anymore. Some time in the last year his feelings for his BFF have changed–and he doesn’t know what to do about them. A friends-to-lovers romantic theme is one of my very favorites (and is the subject of two fun movies, “Made of Honor” and “Some Kind of Wonderful”). It’s delicious to watch the couple struggle with emotions that appear to come out of the blue. For his part, Gil can pinpoint the exact time when Everything Changed (on a road trip, three nights they…

No Shot was Fired, no Blood was Spilled (or even Sipped) in the Making of this Book That’s right, my dear friends. I write what we’re calling these days “straight contemporary romance.” There’s nothing supernatural, otherworldy, or paranormal going on here. No asses getting kicked. No highwaymen, no carriage accidents, no brotherhood of Regency spies. It’s life sort of like we know it. If we lived in California’s wine country. In the middle of a hundred-year-old vineyard. While struggling to keep the family winery afloat. And if we were nicknamed the “Nun of Napa” ever since a wedding-that-wasn’t five years ago. And finally, if we had to turn to the man-next-door, Penn Bennett, the star of Hollywood’s hottest home renovation show, to complete the work on the winery’s historic cottage in order to host a wedding there at the end of the month. It’s a hard job, this straight contemporary romance writing. Okay, so the research wasn’t so bad (reading about winemaking, drinking wine, spending a long weekend in Napa with my husband), but what do you do to get a reader’s pulse racing if there are no knives, no fangs, no men running around in the jungle with their…

Hi! I’m Christie Ridgway, the author of Unravel Me, a sexy contemporary romance (find info and an excerpt at www.christieridgway.com) and tireless reader of romance novels. I was reading a delicious historical last week and in it the hero and heroine were forced by rain to seek a room at an inn. Guess just how many rooms were available? You know, right? It was one. Just the one room which forced these two who are battling their attraction into even closer proximity. Sure it was a convenient tool for the author. A contrivance. At best we could say it was a coincidence that the stars of the book just happened upon this particular inn that only had a single room to rent. But I didn’t care! As a lover of romance novels, I understand that every turn of fortune like this serves to make the tension tighter, the characters’ emotions more turbulent, the reader-enjoyment just that much deeper. One room at the inn, I read, and then I smiled to myself and wiggled into my comfy chair, prepared to be entertained by what all that means. It’s not so different from a football game, I’m realizing (I say this as…