My top five favorite workplace romances? The author who immediately comes to mind on workplace romances is Jayne Ann Krentz. Most of her early heroes felt like cowboys in the boardroom. I used to eat up her contemporary romances like they were going out of style. So I’d have to put an oldie but a goodie, Sweet Fortune by Jayne Ann Krentz, on my list. And if she’s there, then I have to also add Susan Elizabeth Phillips and the first in her Chicago Stars books, It Had to Be You, about a woman who inherits a football team yet knows nothing about the sport. The humor and conflict between the hero and heroine are laugh-out-loud funny. And the steam factor is high! On a less contemporary note, I’m a huge Shelly Laurenston fan, and she’s known for writing zany paranormal romances. But one workplace romance that’s stayed with me is Big, Bad Beast, which pits wolf shifter and former Marine sniper Dee-Ann Smith up against Ric Van Holtz, her boss. I laugh and flip page after page whenever I’m reading Shelly Laurenston’s books. Staying in the paranormal lane, I’d have to go with Thea Harrison’s The Elder Races series,…

Pia Giovanni is the heroine for my new book DRAGON BOUND, the first in the Elder Races series released May 3rd.  Pia is all too well aware that she is problematic.  She is half-human and half-Wyr, with a deep sense that she doesn’t fully belong anywhere, so she has to work twice as hard to pretend to fit in.  So she tends bar and listens to other people’s problems.  It pays the bills and it gives her the sense of community she needs. But let’s face it:  she’s just getting by, she isn’t really rooted anywhere, and bar tending only pays the bills because she doesn’t have that much of a life.  Then she makes a mistake.  She trusts the wrong guy, the relationship doesn’t last, and he blackmails her.  She thought she had problems before but then her life really goes to hell. That’s when she wakes up.  Call it whatever you like, boredom, depression, loneliness.  She realizes she’s been coasting on a lot of things and not really paying attention to what really matters.  The blackmail kicks her out of the rut she has fallen into, and the melting pot of the Elder Races world turns into her…