HAPPY RELEASE DAY!

Romancing Lady Augusta, book 4 in my Welwyn Marriage Wager series, releases today! Go grab your copy here!

It’s currently available on Amazon for .99 as an e-book and also in print.

Book 4 of the series was a bit special for me as the hero is my father’s namesake. All the Marriage Wager heroes bear the middle names of my father and his brothers and grandfather, something I wanted to do to honor my Jackson heritage. So in this book Julius is the hero–a name my father actually disliked but I always loved.

This book gave me fits to write because although I had an idea what the storyline was going to be–and I wrote it almost completely at my writing retreat in March–the history of the characters kept getting in the way of the romance.  Throughout the first three books of the series the characters of Julius, Lord Boxted and Lady Augusta Hardy have been present as secondary and even tertiary characters who are always at odds because Julius kept proposing to her and she kept saying no. Let me tell you, having a five time rejected suitor as a hero is a challenge!

So when I turned the book in, my editor was less than impressed with both characters. They always had a volatile relationship–Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedict come to mind–which tended to make them not as sympathetic as they might be. My excellent editor basically said I needed to make the hero more heroic and make the heroine’s motive for refusing him crystal clear–which is how I came to re-write almost three quarters of the book. I basically had to start their relationship from scratch, kind of ignoring part of their history as it had been written, and show an attraction between them that could blossom except for one impediment: Lady Augusta is in love (or so she thinks) with somebody else.

In the back of my mind I’d always known that Lady Augusta wanted to defy society and go off adventuring around the world, but she was stuck in her role as the daughter of a peer. So I took that as her motivation for rejecting Julius–who has a title and has his life mapped out for him. And history very kindly came to my rescue because the time period of the mid-Victorian era was filled with men exploring the wildest places of the world, with none more famous than Richard Burton (the explorer not the actor) who during the time the novel is set was off adventuring in Africa and the wild American West. So he’s the man Lady Augusta met when she was an impressionable teenager and fancies she wants to marry so she can explore the world with him. And it became Julius’s motivation to convince her he was the better choice as far as husband and adventurer went.

This is why the title changed from No Rival for Your Love to Romancing Lady Augusta, now definitely an homage to the wonderful 1980s movie Romancing the Stone (which I absolutely adore). And this book has now become my favorite of the series because when it came together, it just clicked into place like a missing puzzle piece and made for some of my easiest writing.

To celebrate this auspicious occasion, I’m giving away a signed print copy of Romancing Lady Augusta, and a $20 Amazon gift card to random commenters on this blog post.

Romancing Lady Augusta is now available on Amazon for just .99! Celebrate its release by grabbing your e-copy today!