My old website had a special feature for every story—a look behind the book at what I was thinking when I wrote it. Uncovering Navarro is old enough that it appeared on that old website. This is the book I’ll feature on tomorrow’s “Flashback”. You’ll get a chance to win a free download of this story. In the meantime, here’s what went through my mind when Navarro was conceived.
I’ve wanted to write Navarro’s story for a long time—well, since he first appeared in All Hallows Heartbreaker. I had a sense he was very reserved, but craved…connection. He was also very jaded.
The problem was finding just the right heroine. If I could have planned the story, I would have thought his would be very dark with Navarro facing an old adversary—perhaps the woman who turned him hundreds of years ago. But that decision wasn’t mine to make. Okay, now you get yet another hint I’m not wrapped too tight!
I don’t just decide to write a book about…something. I wait for the first scene to come to me. After several months without working on a MIK, I really wondered whether the adventure was over. But then there was this pesky reporter—not the brightest watt—but so stubborn she’d make Simon Cowell look indecisive. And she was trying to break into a vampire’s den. The first scene with her falling from the brick wall all the way to her “wardrobe malfunction” rolled through my head like an old movie reel in a theater.
It shot the hell out of my dark prince story.
Once the scene presented itself, I was faced with a dilemma. I’m writing erotic romance, but Navarro isn’t a man who’s led by his manparts. So how could I add the sensual intensity (or rather quantity) that my genre requires?
If Navarro was reserved, my heroine had to be a very busy girl. She also wouldn’t be the kind of girl waiting to find her prince. She’d be out there doing lots of test runs! So number one, I needed to show how fast and loose she played it. I also felt like this story would be more closely tied to the first book in the series than any other, so I placed my heroine, Sidney Coffey, at the first scene of my first book—but in Uncovering Navarro you are seeing that first scene from a whole new perspective. I really liked how that all worked out, and I can’t claim responsibility for any cleverness—Moses Brown came knocking at my door.
Who the hell is Moses might you ask? Well his name came from a boyfriend in college who had a penchant for making love on the edge of cliffs. I’m not at all sure that was his real name—it probably had to do with his long, curly blonde hair and beard and the peasant shirts and sandals he always wore. He looked very “biblical”.
But while I liked the name, another face wore it. Between the buff, bald model Rodney (who is on the cover of the Tales from the Temple III anthology) and Ving Rhames, well there you have Moses. A big, tough, sexy guy who has an innate tenderness he rarely lets anyone see. Moses is already calling me to write his story.
