SILENT SCREAM, my eleventh book, will be released on May 25!  I’m very excited about this book because the hero – firefighter David Hunter – is a character whose story I’ve wanted to tell for a very long time.  My readers have wanted me to tell his story too.  Nearly every request I get for a specific character is for David. 

David Hunter was a character who leapt onto my computer screen in my first book, DON'T TELL.  He wasn’t supposed to be a major character, but nobody told him that!  He was my first hero’s little brother, “little” referring only to age.  There is nothing small about David Hunter.  He’s got a huge heart, huge muscles, and well, I’ll let your imaginations just take it from there, LOL.  He’s got a face so handsome that women walk into poles and trip over their own feet because they’re watching David and not where they’re going. 

He’s funny, sweet, loves his mother, is very good with his hands, and for years was loyal to the same woman, even though she didn’t love him back.  After his second appearance in NOTHING TO FEAR, David becomes a firefighter, performing heroic rescues in COUNT TO TEN.  He devotes his spare time to volunteering in battered women’s shelters and works with underprivileged kids.  David was almost too good to be true.

So when it was time to write his story, I was a little puzzled.  What would be the obstacle he’d overcome?  My heroes and heroines are riddled with soul-tortured angst.  Would David be different?

I was frowning over this to a friend who lets me talk through my plots when I’m stuck.  I said, “He’s too good to be true.”  And she waggled her brows and said, “I wonder what he’s hiding.”

And there it was.  David was too good to be true.  His years of service and his unrequited devotion really hid a terrible, guilty secret.  I realized as I started developing David’s character that my knowledge of him was only skin deep.  I knew things about him, but I did not know him. In the previous four books in which he’d appeared, I’d never once been inside his head.  There was a lot I didn’t know about David Hunter.

David is a multi-layered, complicated man.  He had a lot to lose.  But enter Olivia Sutherland, with whom he’s shared a night of explosive passion in the past, and suddenly he has everything to gain.  He and Olivia find themselves chasing a vicious blackmailer who’s killed and will not hesitate to kill again.  This villain witnesses a group of college kids committing arson – only someone gets killed in the fire.  The blackmailer takes this tragedy and twists it for his own gain – and will wipe out anyone who stands in his way.

I loved writing David’s character.  He was a revelation! I hope you all love him too.  Today I’ll be giving away one copy of SILENT SCREAM to a randomly drawn poster. 

Do you like your heroes be tortured souls?  Who are your favorite tortured heroes?

For more on David, check out my website www.karenrosebooks.com for an excerpt, an awesome video, and an opportunity to win free books for you and your friend in my “Give a Friend a Rose” Sweepstakes!

I am often curious about what shapes us as writers. In spite of the fact that my novels are all set in Europe with British narrators, I am actually a Southern writer, heavily influenced by where I came from. I am a sixth-generation native Texan, with roots on my mother’s side going back to the War for Texas Independence. In Texas, like the rest of the south, women gather in the kitchen to gossip, but the men like to tell a tale or two, and more than once I found my grandfather in the yard, telling the same story my grandmother was passing along in the house. Scandal was served up in juicy tidbits, and I learned that if I was quiet and still, they often forgot I was listening. I got an accidental education in some rather grown-up subjects.

Tales of untimely deaths or the occasional incarceration were related in ghoulish detail. I listened to stories about angry fights that erupted into gunfire, and accidental deaths couched as suicides. We were the south Texas version of the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm, with more than a few nasty things to be seen in the woodshed.

I heard about the great-uncle who fell into a bonfire and perished while burning autumn leaves, and I learned about the wife-killer who carved a hope chest in prison, emblazoning the word “Mother” across the lid--it now sits serenely in my mother’s bedroom, and you would never guess it had such dubious origins. And I personally knew five of the family bolters, women who cast off the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood, abandoning their husbands and leaving their children to be raised by relatives.

But family gossip became warp and weft to me of the fabric of storytelling. I learned that conflict is the essence of a good story, and that a tale should twist like a corkscrew to be truly memorable. Like most Southerners, I learned that eccentricity was to be flaunted rather than hidden away. And while my own storytelling might seem to borrow more heavily from the English side of my family, I owe my love of the macabre to my Texan heritage, to men and women who rustled horses and killed their spouses and abandoned their babies and broke murderers out of prison to lynch them. They lived larger than most, and because they insisted on living by their own lights, I have a hundred stories to tell.

www.deannaraybourn.com

I can’t help myself.  I fall in love with all of my heroes.  Each one is custom made and though never perfect, they are always special to me.

When I was writing HAUNTING WARRIOR, the second book in my HAUNTING series, I didn’t just fall in love with Rory MacGrath—I plunged head first.  And I hit hard.  I mean, seriously, look at the man on the cover?  How could I not fall in love with him.

But beyond the heart-throb good looks, what makes Rory so special is the fact that he begins so completely broken.  He’s disconnected from his past, his family and even his heritage.  He’s convinced himself that he doesn’t mind being alone and that he doesn’t long to be loved.  Of course I knew better.  I felt his pain. I could see into his heart. 

Rory has been punishing himself for crimes he thinks he committed, for circumstances he had no control over, and for a loss that was punishing enough.  Tough on the outside, lost on the inside, Rory needed a woman who would help him see his own strengths—a woman who would challenge him to rise above the past that has crippled him emotionally and step back into the circle of the living.  She couldn’t be just any woman and she certainly wasn’t easy to find.  In fact, Rory had to travel through time to reach her.

Thrust back in time to ancient Ireland, Rory opens his eyes in the body of another man who is about to marry the very woman Rory has been dreaming about for weeks.  Suddenly, Rory is fighting for his life—and the life of his new bride.  Their enemies are everywhere and the odds of surviving dwindle with each passing moment.  But now that Rory has met the woman of his dreams, now that he has touched, tasted, and made love to that woman, he realizes that he doesn’t want to be alone anymore.  He will fight to protect her.  He will fight to free them both from the fate the future feels determined to deliver.  He will be the warrior she needs him to be and he will win for love . . . or he will die trying.

So yeah, I fell in love with Rory MacGrath.  I hope you will too.  Tell me what really turns you on about the heroes you love and one lucky commenter will win reader’s choice of an autographed copy of ECHOES or WHISPERS (by me, writing as Erin Grady). 

Erin Quinn

Excerpt from one of my favorite scenes when Rory’s new bride, Saraid, begins to realize the man she married is not who she thought he was . . . .

Saraid took a deep breath when he lowered his head to kiss her, feeling dizzy and sickened and something else she could not define. As if sensing the turmoil inside her, he caught her gaze and held it for a moment, his searching, probing. She felt as if he were trying to say something with those enigmatic eyes, and for a flashing instant she felt again that sense of another lurking behind the sky blue of them. What a frightening mystery this man was.

And then his mouth settled over hers and thought fled. His kiss was warm and soft when she’d expected cold and hard. The touch of his lips gentle and coaxing when she’d prepared for rough and invasive. The kiss was brief, and yet it felt that time stopped for the length of it, giving her the chance to feel every nuance, every unexpected instant. It seemed he tried to pull back and then hesitated, allowing just another moment of the contact that shocked her like a hot ember popping from a blazing fire to burn her. With their hands bound and trapped between their bodies, Saraid could do little more than allow it. She’d be allowing so much more later, when they were alone.

He pulled away, just enough so that he could look into her eyes again, and she saw something there that she did not understand. Confusion that matched her own. A need—but not the kind she’d expected. Not lust, but longing . . .