It’s always fun to have a little something extra, so I wanted to share bonus material from some of my titles with you.
Shielded By the Lawman
Trivia
Harlequin Romantic Suspense (Published February 2019)
1. Original Title: Shielding Sarah. I still love that one, but, of course, I should since I came up with it.
2. Celebrity I pictured for my heroine as I wrote: Sarah Cline looks like actress Emilie De Ravin to me. I loved her performance in “Remember Me” with Robert Pattinson. Also, the haunted look in her eyes was perfect for my Sarah. (Thanks, Emilie!)
3. Celebrity I pictured for my hero as I wrote: I had a hard time finding the person who resembled the Jamie Donovan in my head until I went back to my favorite show, Blue Bloods, and found that actor, Will Estes, was perfect. It’s purely coincidental that my Jamie and Will’s character, Jamie Reagan, share a first name, and they’re both cops. (At least I didn’t do it consciously.) Jamie Donovan was just a wonderful secondary character in my earlier title, Strength Under Fire, who kept clamoring for his own story.
4. Origination of this story: Jamie and Sarah’s story was born during a big brainstorming session with my critique group, the POTL’s in about 2013. I was building the True Blue series and needed to make sure I had several stories to tell about the Brighton Post crew. Though I didn’t write it first, Shielding Sarah was always my favorite story from that long list. (Thanks to my critique partners – Nancy Gideon, Loralee Lillibridge, Laurie Carroll Kuna, Victoria Craven, Patricia Lazarus and Constance Smith – for sharing your ideas and creative energy!)
Available through these and other online vendors – Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million.
Home to You
Menu and Recipes
DLN Publications (Published 2018)
Home to You is a novella, originally published as part of the Falling for You anthology with nine of my Superromance sisters. It is the story of Lily Monroe, a prodigal daughter who returns home to prepare her family’s Thanksgiving dinner on the first holiday after her mother’s passing, and C.J. Grayson, is the love Lily left behind “for his own good.” This book gives you a little taste of the True Blue series while whetting your appetite for all the wonderful dishes Lily and C.J. prepare together.
I enjoyed writing Home to You because it allowed me examine delicate family relationships with a little humor in the setting of a highly stressful holiday dinner. 
For those of you who love autumn stories and like to read several lovely novellas in addition to mine, you can still order the original anthology, Falling for You: 10 Small Town Romance Novellas. It features stories by several of my dear friends, Tara Taylor Quinn, Heatherly Bell, Claire McEwen, Lisa Dyson, Kris Fletcher, Jo McNally, Janet Lee Nye and Angel Smits. Order your copy here.
For fun, I planned a menu for the holiday meal that Lily prepares under C.J.’s tutelage in Home to You. Our Thanksgiving Dinner isn’t quite that fancy, but it’s filled with dishes like pierogi and cabbage rolls and is its own kind of wonderful.
One of the first items Lily makes is cranberry sauce that I modeled off the recipe of my friend, Amanda Saab, a food blogger and past contestant on Fox’s Masterchef. So if you would like to make Cranberry Sauce just like Lily does, check out the recipe on Amanda’s blog here. I tried it last year, and it rocks!
Also in the story, the whole process that C.J. leads Lily through to make a “Real Pumpkin Pie” is the same one my own hero and I navigate each year for our own holiday table. I have included a copy of those steps. My husband does all of this work each year to prepare fresh pumpkin for Thanksgiving and Christmas pies. All I have to do is bake the pies. 🙂
And I do bake them. Homemade pie crust. Homemade filling from my own recipe. Because I really like you all, I’m sharing that recipe today.I always use oil crust for my pies, but that choice is up to you. You can even use pre-made shells. I won’t tell. 😉 But give my Pumpkin Pie recipe a try and let me know how it goes.
