Entangled Publishing – Vanessa Kelly, Author

I’m so pleased to have Robin Covington back on the blog today. Robin writes sizzling romance that truly burns up the sheets! I read her debut book, A Night of Southern Comfort, and loved it. Let’s find out what Robin is up to these days.

What can you tell us about your new story, Secret Santa Baby? I know it will be just as hot as your first book, but it sounds a bit flirtier in tone.

SSB is a fun, sexy little romp about friends to lovers. Nick and Tessa have been friends since college but he didn’t make a move when he should and she dated his best friend for several years. Now Tessa is single and Nick has decided now is the time to win the girl of his dreams. He organizes the Secret Santa gift game at the office and he makes himself Tessa’s Santa and seduces her with the gifts from the song, “Santa Baby”.

It is very sexy but lighter in tone from A Night of Southern Comfort– no stalkers in this one!

Did you enjoy writing a Christmas romance? What gave you the idea to play on the idea of a Secret Santa?

I loved it! Christmas is my favorite time of the year and I had an excuse to listen to Christmas music in the middle of June. (Bonus!) The idea actually came from a submission call at Entangled Publishing. They wanted stories based on the song “Santa Baby and I started rolling it around in my head . . . what if there was a Secret Santa game at an office . . . and what if the hero decided to use the gifts to win the woman he’s loved for years? I wrote it in three days because the story just poured out of me.

What can you tell us about your Boys Are Back In Town series? When does the next one come out?

Oh – I love my Boys. ; )

The Boys – Jackson, Lucky, Teague and Beck – are so much fun. They are all back in their hometown of Elliott, VA for their own reasons and while there they confront their past and find the women for their future. They are sexy, funny and Alpha in the best way. They are a blast to write and very naughty.

The next one – Lucky’s book- will be out in the Spring and the others are scheduled for 2013 as well.

I see that you’re also writing paranormal romance. What made you decide to switch it up from your straight contemporaries?

I had a story in the back of mind from when I began seriously writing three years ago. I had an idea for a paranormal romance, set in modern time where all of the supernatural beings were known to us regular folk. The heroine, owned a dating agency that specialized in matching up human and “the others” and she becomes the target of an extremist group that doesn’t like her business. The hero is a dark, sexy, vampire with whom she has a troubled history. Sparks fly. Clothes come off. People are bitten. Good times. : )

I love the contemporary setting but I find that a paranormal offers a huge amount of freedom to me when creating the setting and the characters. It is so much fun to shake things up a bit!

And now the fun question: You’re stranded on a deserted island with the man of your dreams. You can only bring two luxury items along with you – what would they be?

Robin Covington

Well, if we are stranded all we have to do is lie around and relax and…ummm… relax, I would bring my iPod (you gotta have smexy music) and a large, luxuriously appointed bed.

Secret Santa Baby

Tessa Stoneman hasn’t been able to get long-time friend and business partner Nicholas Boone out of her head since they shared a single kiss in college. Even when she dated Nicholas’s best friend. Now that she’s giving up her position at GameNerdz to strike out on her own—and now that she’s single—maybe it’s the right time to see if there’s still something between them.

Nicholas knows once Tessa leaves the company she helped found, they might drift apart. Before she starts her own company in the new year, he wants to woo the woman he fell in love with during college. So he poses as her Secret Santa, gifts her with items from the song “Santa Baby,” and plans a big reveal at the company holiday party. But when his best friend wants to rekindle his romance with Tessa, will Nicholas lose his last chance?

Vanessa, here. Doesn’t that sound like fun? Please check out Robin’s website to get the deets on all her books. And for my readers today, Robin is giving away two copies of Secret Santa Baby! Just tell us what you’d like to get from your secret Santa for a choice to win the book.

Buy Secret Santa Baby at: Amazon and at Barnes & Noble.

I’m so pleased to have romance writer extraordinaire Robyn DeHart on the blog today. Robyn writes sexy historical romance, with lots of adventure and intrigue. Her books have finaled in bunches of contests and she’s won a number of them, too. Let’s ask Robyn to tell us about her latest book.

A Little Bit Wicked, your first book in the Forbidden Love Series for Entangled Publishing, is now available. How did you come up with the idea for this series? We’ve probably had at least one forbidden love in our lives – what’s the attraction?

Thanks for having me today, Vanessa! Yes, forbidden love is such an attraction. I think it’s the taboo of it that draws me in. The series actually rolled right out of this first book, A Little Bit Wicked. I knew I wanted to create a series and well, one of the main elements to Vivian and Marcus’s story is that she’s older than him (and also a ruined lady). I knew a relationship between them would be forbidden. So I grabbed onto that element as a hook for the entire series and it everything fell into place. A Little Bit Sinful is next and well, those who have read A Little Bit Wicked know that Marcus’s younger sister, Clarissa is embroiled in a scandal…we get her story in that book. And the third…well, readers will just have to wait and see.

Can you tell us something about A Little Bit Wicked? I love the idea of a heroine known as The Paragon!

Thank you. It was funny how that idea came to me. Part of my process when I’m creating stories is that I spend a lot of time thinking about the relationship between the hero and heroine. I get an idea for one of them and then I think about who is the perfect person for them to fall in love with and what are the reasons that make them the worst person to fall in love with and I go from there. I knew what type of person Vivian was, I knew she was prim and proper and that that was of upmost importance to her and I knew why, I knew she had this secret past that she was working quite hard to hide. That one secret sort of snowballed into her being the secret keeper and thus the Paragon was born. I liked the idea of a “cleaner” of sorts in Victorian society – we all know how many scandals were flying around back then. Surely there was someone who could help smooth out the edges of nasty gossip. She was a fun character to write! And creating her match in Marcus was even more fun. He was so intent on ruffling her feathers, on breaking through that prim and proper exterior to find the passionate woman beneath…the chemistry lit up my computer.

You also have a new series coming out from NAL. What can you tell us about it? How does this series differ from your Forbidden Love Series?

Oh yes, I’m so excited about the NAL series! I’ve wanted to sell that first book, The Secrets of Mia Danvers, for a while and I believe I found a great home for it with NAL (thanks to my amazing agent, Kevan Lyon). I’m never great at describing a book, but I can share the back cover blurb because it’s already up for pre-order on Amazon.

A lone witness finds her protector…

Since losing her sight in a childhood accident, Mia Danvers has resided in a small cottage on the vast Carrington estate. Thought to be dead, Mia lives a life of virtual seclusion—until one night, while walking home, she happens upon a horrendous crime.

Alex Foster, Eighth Duke of Carrington, lives according to society’s expectations for him. He’s never met the woman who lives in the cottage at the edge of his property. But when she arrives at his door in the pouring rain terrified and claiming she has witnessed a murder, she seizes his attention.

Mia is determined to help the authorities track down the culprit, even though the only person willing to accept her aid is the handsome, arrogant duke. Working closely together proves difficult as Mia’s beauty and independence tempts Alex to ignore convention and follow his desire. But what neither of them know is that this murderer has struck before in Whitechapel, taunting the British press only to vanish—a ruthless killer who knows that Mia is the only living witness to his crime…

Writing a blind character was a challenge, to be sure, but also really exciting. So far everyone who has read the book loves her and so I feel like I did my job. The series will deal with what happens after the Whitechapel murders, asking the question, what if Jack the Ripper kept on killing. So how this series differs from my Forbidden Love series is that the NAL series is for one, much longer books, and secondly where the Forbidden Love series focuses on the hero and heroine and them falling in love while the NAL series focuses on that same thing, but those people falling in love amidst the backdrop of a terrifying murder investigation. The NAL series is darker and more gritty, everything you would except from a book featuring the notorious Jack the Ripper.

Now for what I call my survivor question – if you were stranded on a deserted island with the love of your life, what two luxury items would you bring with you?

Okay this is probably cheating, but I’m going to say a magic toiletry bag that refills itself as needed, filled with toothbrushes and toothpaste and shampoo and soap. So that’s one item and then the other would have to be my fully loaded kindle so I would never run out of wonderful romance novels to read.

Cheating is definitely allowed on my island, Robyn! For my readers today, Robyn is giving away a copy of her new book. Let’s talk about secrets–are you good at keeping them or bad? Did you ever have a secret you simply had to keep, but found it almost impossible to do so? One person who comments will win a copy of A Little Bit Wicked.

And don’t forget: today is the last day to participate in the Holiday Gifts of Love Blog Hop.

Click on this link to get to my original post and start hopping. Since there are over 200 authors and bloggers giving away prizes, you’ll be glad you did!