Today is the ebook launch day for Saint Sin, a sexy Regency romance I started writing over ten years
ago. I finally finished it and sold it to Soul Mate Publishing last winter.
It’s the third Regency romance I’ve written and features
some of the aspects I like best about this time period. There is a huge emphasis
on propriety and manners, but the reality of how people truly behaved is much
different. There is also a striking divide between the lavish lifestyle of the upper
classes, and the sordid backstreets where the poor struggle to survive. This
disparity created a complex web of crime and duplicity that play a part in the
story.
My heroine’s brother gets caught up in this criminal
underworld and ends up owing an enormous gambling debt. If he fails to pay it,
he will at best be ruined. At worst, imprisoned or even killed. To save her
brother, Ariella Lyndgate is willing to do nearly anything…even become a thief.
When she is offered an opportunity to cancel out the debt by retrieving a valuable
diamond from a man she’s told it doesn’t really belong to, she agrees. The
diamond is in the possession of Michael St. Cyr, a wealthy earl known as “Saint
Sin” because of his outrageous and decadent parties. Ariella arranges to attend
one of these events and immediately begins her hunt for the diamond. She’s
searching her host’s bedchamber when St. Cyr walks in.
Michael assumes Ariella is a “fashionable impure” sent by
one of his friends to entertain him. Desperate to find the diamond, Ariella
goes along with his assumption. Thus begins a complex and erotic deception, one
that becomes even more complicated when Ariella finds herself falling in love
with the man she intends to rob.
Michael St. Cyr has long ago giving up caring about much of
anything. But somehow he finds himself enthralled with this young woman, who
despite her duplicitous behavior, somehow seems sweet and innocent. Can Ariella
heal the pain left by his terrible loss all those years ago? Or will she betray him and break his heart?
Set in the vivid Regency world of glittering ballrooms,
sinister gambling hells and squalid back alleyways, Saint Sin explores the sizzling temptation and wrenching choices faced
by two desperate people who must risk everything for love.
