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May 2008

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"Her Bedroom Surrender"

"Just one night would take her breath away!

Rory Flanaghan is every girl's dream: tall, toned and so, so sexy. On leave from his dangerous overseas job, he's helping out at the gym he owns. When writer Cara Sheehan starts one-to-one sessions with Rory, exercise takes on a whole new meaning! He leaves her with a sensual awareness she's never let herself feel before...

Rory can't understand why this beautiful, feisty woman has a problem with her image, and he knows he can teach Cara what she's capable of... As things get really personal, Rory shows Cara that just one kiss, just one touch...just one night... will leave her breathless!"

For more books like this one go to my Modern Heat page

“You wouldn’t by any chance be a teeny bit the worse for wear would you Cara Sheehan?”

        She blinked and pouted, “Who, me?”

        “Your friend plied you with drink did he?”

        “The girls were doing shots earlier. But I only had a couple. And then some champagne. And then Darren bought me a glass of wine. Or two. I forget now.”

       The thought of what Darren might have expected for those drinks made Rory want to go find him for a quiet word. Instead he held her even closer and guided their movements, trying his absolute best not to be as bad as the recently departed Darren and get turned on by her lush body swaying with his.

       It wasn’t easy.

       Cara then helped loads by wrapping her arms around his neck and pressing her breasts in against his chest before she leaned closer to him to say, “I’m having the most amazing night actually.”

       Rory chuckled, mentally allowing himself to be included in that accolade. She was pleased to see him. That was progress, “So I see.”

       She smiled at him, blue eyes sparkling, “I meant before you got here it was amazing. I’ve had a revelation or two.”

       He raised a dark eyebrow, “From Darren?”

       “I haven’t known Darren long enough for him to reveal anything.”

       And it was damn well staying that way too, “So your night was amazing before you saw me, how?”

       She continued to smile, “I didn’t mean that as an insult.”

       “Sure you didn’t.”

       “We already made peace.”

       “Yes, we did.”

       “Well then shut up and listen.”

       He grinned. Then he moved his hands up and down on her back, smoothing his fingertips over the soft material of her light top.

       And watched as her eyelids grew heavy in response.

       She sighed, “You like to be in charge even when you’re doing what you’re bid, don’t you?”

       “I’d answer that but I was already told to shut up. So tell me about your amazing night.”

       “You’d have been proud of me. I stopped Moira mid-flow.”

       “That so called friend from the Gym that day?”

       “That’s the one,” She made an exaggerated nod of her head, rabbit ears bobbing, “She tried to be smart again and I put her down. First time I’ve let myself do that.”

       “So what changed to make you do it this time?”

       The question silenced her, a small vertical frown of concentration appearing between her luminescent eyes as she thought it over. Then she looked up at him, searched from one dark eye to the other while he watched.

       He had to lean closer to hear her answer.

       “It was just time I guess.”

       He nodded slowly in understanding.

       Cara continued to stare up at him while he let his finger-tips rove over her back. And she didn’t stop him, didn’t pull away, she just swayed with him while thoughts crossed over her expressive eyes. Rory realized he’d never met anyone he could see thinking before. Another Cara-ism. It gave him a warm feeling of affection towards her at a time when he would usually have seen the opportunity to make a move.

       Yep. Like he’d thought before; complicated.

       “How did it go with your friend?”

       Well, that was what he got for not making a move when the opportunity arose. His fingers stilled for a heartbeat and then resumed their gentle exploration, “Not as bad as I thought it would be and worse than I thought it would be.”

       “Can I ask you a question about when it happened?”

       “Can I stop you?”

       A smile, “No. But you could choose to avoid answering me like you usually do. Except this time I’m having an amazing night, so you can’t turn the conversation back onto me so handy. I’m already making progress you see.”

       “Yes, I do see.” And he preferred this openly confident Cara to the one who had been carrying so much aggression when he first met her. Even the way she looked told him she was happier in herself. Did that mean she had forgotten about chasing after her ex too?

       “So, when it happened, were you in charge?”

       The question surprised him, “How did you know that?”

       “Female intuition.”

        He smiled.

       Cara giggled in return, “It was just a few of the things you said about letting people down and the fact that you’re so bossy in everything else you do. You’re a take charge kinda guy, so I assumed that meant you were in a responsible position in your work too.”

       Which meant she’d been thinking about him while he’d been away. That deserved a little honesty in response, “I’m what they call a Team Leader.”

       “So you were in charge when you got ambushed.”

       “Yes.”

       “So, in your mind, does that automatically mean you should have been able to do something to stop it?”

       His smile faded as a familiar heaviness came back to his chest. But at the point where he would normally clam up or change the subject, he surprised both of them by answering her honestly again, “There’s no way anyone can predict when or where a Team gets hit. And it wasn’t the first time we’d run into trouble on that route. It was just the first time any real damage was done.”

       “But you still think you could have done something to stop it, don’t you?”

       This time he didn’t answer her.

       So she smiled softly, “That’s what I figured.”

       Rory shook his head, if they were going to have an intimate conversation then a night club wasn’t the place to do it.

       “Alright, I’m gonna stop quizzing you for now. That’s probably as much as you’ve told anyone in a while anyway.”

       “Yes, it is.”

       “I know,” She tilted her head and smiled again, “I’m just glad that I’m not the only one who goes telling someone I barely know things that I’ve not talked about to anyone else. It evens the playing field out.”

       Yes, it did. Which, for someone who was used to being in charge of every relationship he’d ever had with a woman; was a rare thing. 

       A glance away from her face brought an approaching Darren into his line of vision.

       “You almost done here for the night?”

       “Yeah, I think this place closes soon.”

       “Right then,” Releasing her, he folded her hand in his and pulled her off the dance-floor, away from Darren, “I’ll take you home.”

       And he couldn’t resist a warning glance over his shoulder as he drew her away. It only took the one.

       If anyone was going to spend time with this newly confident version of Cara it damn well wasn’t a Darren.

       Rory frowned hard at the idea of him or any other man taking advantage of her slightly inebriated state. He’d punch every damn one of them if they tried.

       The soft hand enfolded in his squeezed gently, drawing his attention back to her face as she smiled again, a question in her eyes.

       And he felt an answering smile form in his chest before it made its way up to his face.

       Nope. For the time being she was all his.

Breathless! was a story that stemmed from real life events and became such a joy to write that it will remain a firm favourite of mine for a long, long time! In fact, if anyone knows a Rory Flanaghan in real life, and he's single... well, send him my email addy...

This one started with current events I guess and with a friend I know who has found himself caught up in the whole thing. And from his descriptions of life as a professional 'bodyguard' came every idea for the kind of conflicts Rory, my hero, would experience in this story... Maybe having someone I could ask candid questions meant that Rory became so real to me that he almost wrote his own story!

Rory is a very strong character and yet he lives, fictionally speaking, in a country that has been 'fortunate enough' not to have gotten involved in too many battles off it's own soil - so I had to think long and hard about why someone like him would seek out so dangerous a job - what would motivate him to put his life at risk? And the answer came from my real life friend - it's the people Rory works with...

And knowing that meant that Rory's character took on a very real depth. He takes his responsibilities very seriously and so, when he met my heroine, it was very natural that he took on the responsibility for her 'well-being' too...

With a little help from my friends over on My Blog, I cast an equally strong personality as my potential hero when I started writing - one who was also devastatingly sexy, with a good dose of bad boy thrown in... And suddenly Rory Flanaghan became my kinda guy!!!

A hero like Rory was therefore gonna need one heck of a heroine to stand up to him... and here my inspiration started with an unusual source... exercise...

At the time I had bought a Swiss Ball to encourage me to do a work-out every day. And it hurt. Not in a bad way, but in a using muscles I hadn't used before way. Which, me being me, led to a lot of raucous joking... Then my imagination kicked in - and I thought - what if my heroine was in a similar situation? What if she had to lose some weight but really hated the whole working out thing? What if she had to work out with an incredibly sexy guy watching over her? How embarrassing would that be! And just how many one-liners would she come out with to cover up that embarrassment???

Add one heroine casting of an actress who can carry off sarcastic, self-depreciating humour with the best of them and Cara was born...

It was a match made in heaven!

But what I think I loved the most about writing Cara, was the fact that she's very 'normal'. She has body issues, like nearly every woman on the planet. She has had a disastrous love life, like nearly every woman on the planet has at some stage. And yet she has dreams of changing her life and making herself over, like so many of us would love to do. Consequently, for me, Cara is the most real heroine I have ever written...

Locations in this book:

Due to the fact that Cara meets Rory when she goes to hire a personal trainer, the location was easy - and mostly set in the Gym that Rory co-owns with his younger brother Connor (who became the hero of my next Modern Extra - The Return Of The Rebel) The Gym lent itself to many of the scenes - and had a swimming pool that features on the cover of the book and in many of the sex scenes (!!!)

And the whole thing is centred once again around Dublin and a little bit in the outlying town of Dun Laoghaire...

The thing I'll remember most about my location when writing this book was the summer heat-wave we had! It was just too darn hot to write during the day, so I waited 'til the wee small hours when it was cooler and then I put on the music, opened a bottle of wine, and wrote tag-team style in a word-count race with my good friend Natasha Oakley...

Soundtrack playing: 

I played the one album on constant repeat while writing this book. And loved it so much I gave away copies of it in a competition here on my website....

Ex- Boy-band member Duncan James has some truly gorgeous lyrics on his Future Past album and in particular there were two or three tracks that just summed up Rory and Cara's story to perfection (and a hidden track that could have been written solely as the soundtrack for this book!!! - even if it did mean waiting eight flipping minutes at the end of the album to hear it every time!)

You can order a copy of the album here if you'd like some romantic inspiration of your own...

*All Photographs are used to give a visible representation of the Authors 'view' and are in no way representative of the people or places in real life beyond the realms of the Authors imagination.

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