Lou Cortez—badass mechanic, amazing paint specialist, artist extraordinaire, and lady killer. Lou knows women. He’s got his mother, grandmother, five sisters, and over a dozen other female relatives living close by. He respects women, admires women, but there’s one particular woman he’s been crushing on for a while. Unfortunately, she won’t give him the time of day. So Lou’s refined his technique, narrowing it down to 5 MUST DO’s. One way or the other, he’ll get Josephine Reeves’s attention. God willing… Smile more. Women love a man who has a sense of humor. And growing up with his family, humor was a must. (God, could his sister Stella just once not date a d*ckhead?) Study the guys and figure out how they did it. His best friends and fellow mechanics, men with way less going on than Lou, managed to snag some fine women. An almost impossibility, considering what normally comes out of the guys’ mouths. How the hell did they do it? The next time he sees her, Lou plans to hold back a little on the charm. No doubt he overwhelmed her, as fine as he is. Thinking about it, he finds that understandable. Woo her with the…

As fall finally starts to creep in we turn our attention toward new holiday reads. Of course Halloween arrives weeks for Thanksgiving and Christmas, so it was only a matter of time before the spooky-sexy books began filling our e-readers. Miranda Owen chatted with Marie Harte about her newest romance ALL I WANT FOR HALLOWEEN, the perfect addition for anyone looking to dig into a new book instead of a pumpkin. I love Halloween-themed romances, and in ALL I WANT FOR HALLOWEEN, I think you do a wonderful job of maintaining balance between the silly, the sexy and the emotional punch. Do you consciously try to maintain that balance in every book you write, or does it just happen organically? Which comes first, or is easiest to write – the story or the characters? Thanks! I like humor in my books, and I tend to write on the sexy side. I do strive for a balance between deeper emotion and humor. While I’d like to you feel what my characters feel, I also want you to enjoy the experience, and to me, laughter and tears go together quite well. *grin* Though not all my stories have sad pasts, they have…

Angst, the A word. I’m not a big angsty person. I’m low-key, don’t like a lot of drama, and tend to shy from entertainment where my emotions are being tugged up and down and making me want to hurl as if on a roller coaster. I’m more the fun and sexy storygoer, the one who likes her romances to end in a happily ever after and for the main characters to be likeable. So, yeah, okay, that’s not always realistic, and not always possible. A lack of conflict, I learned early on in my writing career, is BORING. Why am I even invested in lukewarm happy people? What obstacle must they overcome to get to blissful love ever after? Because that’s where the magic is. In watching two flawed characters grow and develop throughout a story into characters you root for. In JUST THE THING, I wanted to deal with grief. The book is still uplifting and funny, but it’s got an undertone of real vulnerability in the main characters who both deal with loss in different ways. Zoe, the heroine, has lost her twin, and it’s deeply affected her. She faces her grief head-on, accepts her crying jags, and…

It’s never easy being a middle child, and that’s kind of how I think of book 3 in my McCauley Brothers series. RUINING MR. PERFECT deals with Cameron, the youngest McCauley sibling, but the book is sandwiched between two books that made me cry at times when writing them. It’s a challenge to write a story about four brothers and not have them all be the same. They’re raised in the same house, by the same people, but must have different flaws and vulnerabilities. Yet they can’t be so polarizing that they’re caricatures instead of characters. Big difference. In book 1, THE TROUBLEMAKER NEXT DOOR, Flynn is a charming, decent guy who hasn’t found Ms. Right yet. Enter Maddie, stage left. In book 2, HOW TO HANDLE A HEARTBREAKER, Brody has some secrets that have molded him into the man he is today. He’s sexy and funny, but wounded emotionally. Abby is just the woman for him, because she won’t take less than she deserves, and that she knows he can give. Book 3, RUINING MR. PERFECT, pits Cameron against a stubborn woman with a hard heart and a troubled parent with a hard head. Cam has always been the…

I’ve been writing professionally for ten years, making a fulltime living at it for the past six. So why should I be so excited to have THE TROUBLEMAKER NEXT DOOR coming out with Sourcebooks? First of all, I’m ALWAYS excited on release day. I don’t care if it’s for a publisher or myself. Release day is the culmination of a lot of hours of hard, grueling work in the manuscript draft, editing, more editing, polishing, proofing and promoting. It’s exhausting but so worth it to see that cover ready to be opened. But this series with Sourcebooks marks the beginning of a new medium for me—mass market. When I started writing, if you didn’t have a book published in paperback you weren’t considered a real writer, an unfortunate happenstance considering I started my career in ebooks. *grin* Back then, ebooks were the redheaded stepchild. Today, they’re the new black. I’ve had books in electronic format, trade format, and audio. But never before mass market. And it’s a true thrill, I’ll admit, to line up my McCauley Brothers books right next to others on my keeper shelf. Unlike my others, these fit! What makes THE TROUBLEMAKER NEXT DOOR also special is…