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My romantic suspense, Charade was only the third time I’d ventured into penning a sizzling scene but I was apparently getting rather good at it. So good, in fact, that my editor at HarperCollins – a naive and bespectacled young woman whom I suspected at the time had never set foot outside the comfort zone of her own borough – requested that I “turn down the heat”.
When I was 15, no one could see me. No one who really mattered, that is, which – in my sophomoric myopia – revolved around a hottie senior boy named Artie. Artie was tall, handsome, smart and, on occasion, borrowed his father’s tweed sport coat that had suede elbow patches and made him look like quite a promising young captain of industry. In retrospect, he reminded me of John Davidson (which just goes to show what conservative, white bread taste I had in an era that fostered The Beatles, free love, draft-dodging, and Mary Quant cosmetics).
Back when I was in high school, my bookshelves were filled with the Gothic romances of Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt and Phyllis A. Whitney. In my mind's eye (especially on a dark and stormy night!), I liked to cast myself as one of the intrepid governesses who finds employment at the manor house of a devastatingly handsome but brooding lord with a plethora of mysterious, murderous relatives and eavesdropping servants.
BEHIND EVERY GREAT ROMANCE IS A STRUGGLING WRITER
Can Life really imitate Art? When sophomore Laurie Preston is chosen to be lead screenwriter for a movie her high school is producing, she sees the chance of a lifetime to scribble a romantic script that will finally make the boy of her dreams say the words she's been longing to hear. Unfortunately, the senior hottie who won her star-struck heart from the very first moment she saw him has yet to discover she even exists.