Best Story Free

Protecting His Brother’s Bride is officially available in e-book format and I’m absolutely in love with my cover!  Kissing in the rain…you’ve got to get a little lost in the moment to ignore Mother Nature.  And my hero and heroine have plenty of opportunities to ignore the elements.

Kira Kincaid will go to any lengths to clear her name--even team up with Dalton Matthews, her estranged...now deceased...husband's brother. When their mission exposes an earth-shattering family secret from both their pasts, Dalton must choose between his brother's betrayal and the one woman he should deny.

So...who hasn't gotten caught in a thunderstorm with the threat of tornados? Two weeks ago I was in Dallas for the North Texas Romance Writers of America monthly meeting and our guest speaker was fellow Harlequin Romantic Suspense author, Melissa Cutler. Melissa joined Angi, Lara and I for dinner at a BBQ restaurant and Mother Nature whipped up a wonderful display of power. Thunder, lightning, pounding rain and high winds that made the trees bend toward the ground.  It was Melissa's first experience with severe weather. She's a San Diego girl used to earthquakes. I told her that we were pretty safe in the brick building that looked to be eighty-plus years old.  In my head I'm thinking "where's the basement?"

I'm an Iowa girl who transplated to Kansas.  I grew up with tornado warnings every spring.  Our scariest experience happened about ten years ago when we went camping with my cousin. We borrowed a tent and sleeping bags from a friend and traveled to a lake about 2 1/2 hours away. My cousin had a travel trailer and we set up our tent right next to them.  We'd only been at the lake for four hours when the sky darkened and the wind gusted. There was no way we were staying in a tent overnight, so we threw everything in our SUV and raced for home, with tornadoes visible the entire way.

I love to find ways to use seasons and weather to set a mood or establish the tone for a scene. In the beginning of Her Bodyguard, I open with the hero in a snowstorm on a desolate prairie, which reflects the condition of his life and his heart: desolate, wasted, frozen. Here's a short blurb:

Hell must be like this. Not lit with blazing fires, but cold and gray, barren as the dead prairie. Even the wind howled like a deranged demon, flinging bits of ice into Buck’s face. He drew the blanket and oilskin tighter, although nothing warmed the persistent chill in his bones that had gotten worse as he’d ridden north through Indian Territory. He was a walking dead man here in Kansas, so it seemed somehow fitting he’d entered the abode of the damned.

He patted Goliath’s neck, glad for the company of his horse. He had few acquaintances, even fewer friends, and none who would risk their necks for another man’s cause. Buck wouldn’t have risked getting his neck stretched had the plea not come from his only remaining kinsman. Although at this point, freezing to death seemed more likely than being lynched.