Muse...ings

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.