I guess I am the classic example of the woman who couldn’t decide what she wanted to do when she grew up.  Well, I did settle on “writer.”  But I started off with newspaper articles, then slopped into novels with a kids’ science-fiction book for Scholastic. Since I’d read mostly science fiction and mystery, I didn’t even know the romance genre existed.  But when a friend asked me if I wanted to try writing one, I found that these were novels all about the relationship thread that I’d loved in the books I had read, like The Puppet Masters, by Robert Heinlein, which is almost classic romantic suspense. After writing straight romances, I found I wanted to do stories with more plot, which was why I gravitated toward romantic suspense, like the Rockfort Security books, which all feature a man and a woman falling in love while determined killers threaten their lives.  And I also love creating a community of people like the Rockfort agents who will go the extra mile for each other. You see both these characteristics in PRIVATE AFFAIR, where Olivia Winters and Max Lyon have to pose as an engaged couple to investigate the murder of…

I love writing about sexy vampires, werewolves and dragon-shifters. But I wasn’t always so comfortable with the world of dark fantasy creatures. Not when I was a kid with a vivid imagination. At the age of four, I moved with my family to an apartment building with an elevator that broke down periodically, trapping tenants for hours. I was afraid to ride that elevator by myself, so I’d dash up or down five flights of stairs to our apartment. Unfortunately, by the age of six, I’d learned about vampires, and they’d be right behind me in the dark stairwell, their cold breath chilling the back of my neck. To my relief, we moved into a house when I was eight. Where the kid up the street had a gruesome collection of Tales from the Crypt comic books that gave me nightmares. Why didn’t I stop reading them? Probably only a psychoanalyst can give you the answer. I graduated from comic books to scary novels and short stories. Dracula was my next vampire. I read Bram Stoker’s classic when I was 15, and the count scared me spitless. I was so traumatized that I couldn’t sleep in the same room with…