Because I cannot send you chocolate for Valentines’ Day, I thought I would send you another kind of  “candy” instead.  Welcome to my rogues gallery of hot, hunky, heroes from fiction and film.

Granted these are my personal faves, but let’s be candid ladies—we all have images we are particularly fond of.  Mine may reflect a taste in older men—always have thought the older the violin the sweeter the music.  But that’s not to say I won’t take a long pause to savor a sweet young thing either.

But I don’t know that my taste in men comes across in my writing.  So far my heroes have been youngish (early 20s to early 30s), well-built and mostly athletic, around six foot tall (one towers at 6’4”) and a rainbow of hair colors ranging from dark, walnut brown to ash blonde.  Strangely none of them have had my favorite auburn colored locks.

 Writing these men has been challenging:  how do you make them handsome, sexy, intelligent, witty, charming, and still realistic?  Let’s face it, romance writers are writing about fantasy men—the men we all wish we would meet or be rescued by.  So if they are a fantasy, why not make them perfect?  Endow them with everything our hearts (and our readers’ hearts) might desire?

Because perfection, quite frankly, is boring.  Even perfect looks can, after a while, pall.  (I must admit, this has not happened when I think of any of the men pictured below, but then I don’t have to live with them. *Sigh*)  But a less than perfect visage will often be more arresting, show more character, than the perfect “prettyboy” picture.

And because perfection is boring, heroes also need flaws.  Something for the heroine to fix, something for him to struggle against, something for the reader to hope he can overcome to achieve his HEA.  These obstacles, that come only from within the hero himself, give your story all or part of its conflict and interest.  How your hero deals with what life has dealt him, how he makes decisions that affect him and his heroine, how he rises above his flaws is what keeps the reader turning the pages late into the night.

So the men below, first a list of my favorite romance heroes whose faces exist probably only in my mind, then the “eye candy” I promised, are the men who, at one point or another, have made me say, “I think I’m in love.”

Here are a half-dozen heroes from some of my favorite romance novels:

1.  Rhett Butler—the epitome of suave and debonaire  from Gone With the Wind; he was my “first.”

2.  Mr. Darcy—say no more

3.  Wulfgar—hero of Wolf and the Dove (my first medieval, and his name says it all)

4.  Beowulf Malloren—Jo Beverly’s Marquess of Rothgar; dark, tormented, and sexy personified in Devilish

5.  Nicholas Delaney—the hero I love to hate from Jo Beverly’s An Arranged Marriage

6.  Sebastian St. Vincent–a real bad boy who gives up his rakish ways for the love of a shy, yet strong young woman in Devil in Winter

So I have shared some of my by favorite sexy men.  Now it’s your turn.  Who is your ultimate hot, hunky hero?  Come on, share!