BLURB:
‘Tis the season to be scandalous…
Exiled to Bath for Christmas, Miss Portia Willingham writes to her uncle to cheer her up. The letter lands in the lap of a stranger, Nicholas, Lord Daventry, who travels to Bath in hopes of meeting the spirited young woman he only knows by the name of “Pence.” But protocol demands they be introduced, and as they don’t know each other by sight, and Portia is prohibited from attending the dances at the Assembly Rooms, they must find a more ingenious way of turning their forbidden correspondence into a Christmas romance neither one will ever forget.
I am a big fan of the movie You’ve Got Mail. I love Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in this enemies to lovers romance and so in 2019 I wanted to come up with a Regency version as a Christmas story. There were, however, some challenges.
First, of course, there was no email during the Regency period. So I’d have to resort to letter writing for my couple. Even worse, unless the gentleman was a close relative or a lady’s fiancee, she wasn’t allowed to write letters to him. So how on earth were my couple going to correspond?
Enter the fickle finger of fate… A letter written by the lady to her favorite uncle goes astray and falls into the hands of a gentleman who opens it by mistake and is immediately enchanted by the author. He responds to her and, against the rules and her better judgement, she continues the correspondence.
To write this fun romance I ended up doing a lot of research about..letters during the Regency. What they looked like, how they were written (there were no envelopes so the sender wrote on all sides of the letter save one, then folded the letter so that one side could be used to address the letter), how they were sealed, how they were sent (the person who received the letter paid for it). And even better, the summer I wrote this novella I was actually traveling in England, specifically to Bath where the story is set. I went to a post office museum and found wonderful artifacts from the Regency era that were just like the correspondence my couple would have written.
Then I went to the Assembly Rooms, the actual rooms where my couple would have met and danced in (eventually) just days after I’d written that scene. Let me tell you I got chills when I stood there, seeing the rooms that I’d just described and where my couple had met and danced. It was an experience I’ve never quite had before and it was wonderful.
So you can see the It Happened at Christmas really holds a soft spot in my heart. I hope if you read it, you will too!
It Happened at Christmas is available on Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited. Grab your copy today and see what a romance letters can create!
Charlie’s face froze, his eyes widening for a moment before his smile broadened to match them. “Then please accept my very best wishes for your happiness.”
“It was lovely to see you again after all this time, Charlie.” Mama was pouring more tea, although the pot had to be stone cold by now. “You must return and dine with us this evening. Lord Tollesbury will want to see you, I’m certain. You cannot deny him that pleasure, can you?”
The reason this series is so personal for me is all the heroes are named after my uncles–their middle names, at least–as an homage to my father and his brothers. The hero of Yule Be Mine, is named for my father’s oldest brother, Ivan Ulysses. So my hero is Ulysses Quartermain, the grandson of the Duke of Welwyn, but everyone calls him Yule. Which made for a perfect title, given that the novella takes place at Christmas.
Its first release date was 2015 with the title A Kiss Beneath the Mistletoe and a very amateurish cover by yours truly. I was really on a shoestring budget in those days. Then the following year, when I decided Kiss should be the prequel to my Handful of Hearts sweet romance series, my editor, Danielle Fine, re-imagined the cover in order to make it go along with the other covers in the series. I still think it’s very Christmasy and beautiful. And the title changed to Hearts Beneath the Mistletoe, in keeping with the titles of the series.
Jenna Jaxon Romance--because passion is timeless. 