My favorite couple is…!

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I love all of the couples I write about. Not unlike my children and grandchildren, for various reasons they are all my favorites. But I know our blog theme for this month was to pick our favorite couple…so drum roll please! The couple I had the most fun writing about, and watching fall in love is Abigail Monroe and Cole Stanton. They made their first appearance in A Surprise for Abigail, book one in the bestselling Women of Surprise series.  This was the first book of mine to hit a best seller list. I think of this as the little book that could and maybe that's really why it's my favorite.

Cole Stanton was a man on the move. On his own since the death of his family, he drifted from place to place, guarding his heart from attachment to anything or anyone. Meanwhile, Abigail Monroe was busy planning her wedding until she was jilted by her intended, Edward Quinn. Her heart broken and her hopes dashed, Abigail vowed to never fall in love again, fleeing to the town of Surprise to visit her sick Aunt Margaret.

However, when Abigail arrived, she found that her Aunt Margaret had an unorthodox request of her: become the town's first woman sheriff!  When Abigail agrees, her life quickly turns upside down. Her first arrest is none other than Cole Stanton, for drunken and disorderly conduct. After his arrest, it becomes clear to Abigail that Mr. Stanton could be much more than he seems. He may very well be a wanted man: wanted both by the law and by Abigail.

I still love Abigail and Cole’s story! But right now I’m working on another one of my favorite couples soon to be available for your reading enjoyment, the couple from my upcoming, Waterfall Press release, A Changed Agent. When schoolteacher Elsie Mitchell meets rugged William Benton on a train platform in Albany, it appears they have nothing in common. He isn’t the sort of fellow a proper young woman of the 1890s would ever speak to, much less become involved with. But when she arrives at her small town in the Adirondack Mountains, Elsie is offered a job as caregiver for this mysterious out-of-towner’s niece and nephew, who’ve been tragically orphaned. Heartbroken for them, she accepts.

Unknown to her, William is an undercover Pinkerton agent posing as a lumber-company foreman. He’s never wanted family—his work is too dangerous. Yet as Elsie transforms his house into a home and he spends time with the children, he feels drawn to family life—and to Elsie. As a good Christian, Elsie is troubled by William’s secrets…though she does find him intriguing. And when a sinister figure from her past arrives, Elsie and William will have to trust in faith and newfound love to protect their unlikely family from danger.

Be they fictional or from real life I know everyone has an all-time favorite couple. Leave me a comment to tell me who yours is! 

A Surprise For Abigail available at Amazon.com
A Change Agent now available for pre-sale at Amazon.com
Be one of the first to learn about my new releases, follow me at amazon.com/author/traceylyons

Barrett & Ella Find Strength With Each Other

As an author, choosing favorites from the characters that I’ve created, is a difficult thing to do. To me, they are all real people with real backgrounds and histories, who have revealed their stories to me to put on paper.

However, we agreed to choose a favorite couple and that was actually pretty easy: Barrett Strong and Ella Edison from my Strong Armed series. There is a part of me that would write about them over and over again.

The series itself, books one through four, are told first person from Ella’s perspective. Ella is so complex, it was both a fun and challenging experience to write her. On the surface, she would appear to have everything. She is a child of privilege, sharing an upscale apartment, purchased by her stepfather, with her younger sister. She is beautiful, smart, educated, witty and tough. But Ella leads a dual existence, born from a childhood of emotional control and sexual abuse by her father and other men

To say that Ella has a low self-esteem would be an understatement. She has no self-esteem whatever. And as we learn from the first sentence of the book, Ella’s life sucks.

Barrett Strong is a master in the business world, who loves a challenge. He started his own company and turned it into an international empire. An American, his company is based in London and when we meet him, he is expanding to New York. He is self-esteem personified and seems to have the world at his feet. Almost instantly upon his arrival, the gorgeously sexy alpha male is dubbed the most eligible bachelor in New York. But nothing about Barrett is eligible. Still mourning the death of his young wife, six years earlier, he has made Strong Enterprises Worldwide his life.

After a chance meeting in a hotel bar, Barrett and Ella each blow off a business meeting for an afternoon of anonymous, hot sex. Of course, unbeknownst to either of them, the meeting was supposed to be with each other. Upon discovering each other’s identity, they enter into an unconventional business arrangement.

I wrote the first series supplement Born Strong in tandem with the actual series. It retells the first book from Barrett’s point of view. This was important for me, because I didn’t want Barrett to come off as a user or manipulator. I needed to understand his motivations, and I needed to ensure that even when feeding Ella’s dark side, he was still my hero.

I love this couple together because they fix what is broken with each other. Ella doesn’t believe she is fit to be loved and thinks her family’s unending love and support is out of necessity. The fact that Barrett gives a damn, gives her the strength to dig deep within herself and finally face the demons that haunt her. Barrett doesn’t believe his broken heart will ever heal and when he begins to fall in love with Ella, he denies it to himself and everyone that will listen.

Once together, this fragile couple fights the past, the present and the future to make their relationship work. Together they face the unimaginable and continue to grow stronger.

After the first series was published, many of my readers sent me requests for more of this story. That’s when I published the first supplement, Born Strong and I hope that everyone got to delve deeper into who Barrett Strong really was and how far Ella brought him.

In the upcoming weeks, I will publish the second supplement, Inner Strength, which is a three-part standalone book, telling the story of Barrett and Ella’s younger siblings, Bryn and Carson, a fan favorite couple. And I couldn’t resist bringing my favorite couple back, this time seen through the eyes of sibling rivalry.

If you have already read the Strong Armed series, I hope you enjoyed reading Barrett and Ella’s story as much as I enjoyed writing it. If you haven’t, I would love the opportunity to introduce you!

The pair who started it all: Gavin and Ericka

Asking an author who is their favorite character or characters is the same as asking them to choose a favorite child. It's difficult. No respectable parent chooses one child over the other. But as authors, we can tread ever so lightly over that forbidden line and say we like a set of characters more than the others. The only risk: the others may not speak for awhile and thus the creative flow ceases. I choose not to take that chance. I'm such a slow writer that even the slightest possibility they won't speak can create a void in the story and days without typing a word.

What I have chosen to do is introduce you to the eldest brother, Gavin, of the Cursed MacKinnons series and his lovely wife, Ericka. Their story started in the first book of the series Curse of the Gargoyle and they have been instrumental characters for the rest of the family members throughout the continuation of this saga.

In 1740 Scotland, seven brothers were turned to stone by the Curse of the Gargoyle. Each is being set free in today's time by the women of their destinies.

 Book one in the Cursed MacKinnons series

Gavin has been entombed in stone for hundreds of years, waiting for the right person to break the curse that put him there. After the voice of an unknown woman speaks the special words to free him, he finds himself in a time that is no longer his own. Though this woman pleasures him in every imaginable way, he’s still racked with anguish for all he’s lost. Duty, honor and his deep-seated need for revenge consume him.

Ericka thought flying to Scotland was the toughest feat of her life. That was until she met a ghost and freed a seventeenth-century Scottish hunk from stone. Ghosts aren’t real and curses don’t exist. Hot sex with Gavin fuels her imagination, but he can’t possibly be her soul mate, or can he…

The evil behind the curse lingers. Gavin is stone by day, man by night. Together they fight, determined to overcome the source behind the curse. But if they fail, their love could be lost for eternity.

Gavin and Ericka started this creative journey for me and it has ventured into a total of six books so far with the potential for more. I'm currently in the process of creating Aunt May's story. She's been such an amazing force behind this clan that she deserves some happiness of her own.

Tara Nina

My Favorite Romance Couple: The Doctor and the Rock Star

When my fellow authors and I decided to chat about favorite authors from our own books this month, my first thought was….I have to choose just one??!! As you can imagine, when we spend so much time with our characters, it can be tough to pick a favorite.

But, if I absolutely have to choose, I’d have to go with Paige and Jared from my book Getting Lucky with the Rock Star (Holiday Encounters Book 3).

Paige Jordan is confident, strong and ambitious…and she has a secret. She’s spent most of her life working towards being a doctor, and now that she’s in her first year of medical school, well, saying she hates it is putting it mildly. For her, admitting it’s not for her is life admitting to failure and for a while she struggles to find a way to do something she loves while staying true to herself.

Jared Sloane is the lead singer for the rock band Sliding Violet. Paige meets him by chance at a hotel bar, and he becomes her second secret. When the sparks fly between them, they decide to see each other whenever he’s in New York—which seems to happen more and more often after he meets Paige. Paige doesn’t even tell her closest friends about her relationship with Jared, not wanting to share the one thing in her life that brings her joy these days.

When I started writing about Jared and Paige, I was expecting their biggest issue to be Jared’s ego. I figured he’d be the typical rock god who would have a few things to learn from down to earth Paige. But the opposite ended up being true.

Jared turns out to be a good guy who just happens to be a rock star. He works just as hard as Paige, and he goes out of his way to show Paige how much she means to him. As he came to life on the page, Jared just made me melt. It’s not hard to see why Paige falls so hard for him.

Ready to fall in love with Paige and Jared, too? You can find them on Amazon, either on their own or as part of the Holiday Encounters anthology:

Getting Lucky withthe Rock Star

Holiday Encounters: Books 1-3 

How about you guys? Who is your favorite romance novel couple of all times? I’d love to hear your favorites!

Happy Reading!
Amy Lamont

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