Twas the Night Before Christmas...

It's Christmas Eve and I'm sure, like me usually on this frenetic day, you will be up to your elbows in Christmas preparations. However, please take some friendly advice and make sure that you make plenty of time for yourself over Christmas, especially if you are the host.

You see, the trouble with hosting is that you are so concerned with making sure that your guests are having a good time that you run yourself ragged seeing to their every need. One thing I have learned after years and years of hosting is to do as much in advance as you possibly can. Christmas Eve is always a cooking day for me. I precook everything that I can- Yorkshire puddings, desserts- and prep everything else including the vegetables. That way, I get to sit down with a glass of bubbles on Christmas day and join in the fun which I am denied in the kitchen.

This year though, I had to be super organised. All my pre-cooking, present buying and decorating happened weeks ago. You see, with impeccable timing, as you read this I will be on a plane coming home from my Christmas present from Mr H, a lovely trip to Barbados. I land at Heathrow at 7.30am tomorrow and once I get home my lovely son and daughter will hopefully have started making Christmas dinner in my stead. I can't wait! This is the first Christmas in twenty-one years I haven't had to completely host and I hope its the first of many now that my children are adults.

I hope yours is filled with family and friends too...

Happy Holidays!

Virginia Heath's Christmas Regency Romantic Comedy His Mistletoe Wager is out now!

His Mistletoe Wager is out now

 

5 things about me...

1.      I’m in love with Flynn Rider from the film Tangled. Yes- I do know he’s a cartoon and that being in love with something drawn with a pencil and then coloured in is weird, but in my head Flynn is a completely gorgeous hero. Cheeky, dashing, just a teensy bit tortured, devilishly handsome and spouts witty one-liners even when they in inappropriate. I also love his voice, especially when he sings, it makes melt.

     2.      I’m a complete tourist. I adore travelling to far-flung places and soaking up the culture. I could have bought a significantly bigger house with all the money I’ve spent exploring the world yet if I could have my time again I wouldn’t do it differently. I mean, riding through the jungle in Thailand on the back of an elephant tops another spare room which would only get used once in a blue moon anyway. Who needs another bathroom when they can snorkel between the Pitons in St Lucia and feed bananas to the Sergeant Major fish? And why would I want all that extra housework when I could get in a car and just drive through Death Valley? My favourite place- Disneyland of course!

3.      I’m a spice fiend. My favourite food is curry- and not those tame sorts of curries wusses eat. Proper hot curries from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Thai food is another favourite, along with Japanese and Mexican. In fact, if I was ever marooned on a desert island, so long as chillies grew there I’d be happy. However, my favourite drink in the whole world is a proper cup of British tea.

4.      I like spiders. I wouldn’t want to pick out curtains with them or keep them as pets, but picking one up doesn’t bother me. When other people are cringing, and screaming, I’m the brave saviour who marches in and puts the wriggly, hairy little arachnid outside. I don’t even need a glass to carry them in.

5.      I usually get all my story ideas in the middle of the night when I should be sleeping by my brain won’t let me. It’s been the same since I was a little kid. When I couldn’t sleep, I let my imagination wander and often used to enjoy going to bed early so that I could revisit the wonderful worlds I created sooner. A lifetime of casual insomnia has turned me into a storyteller. So every cloud…

Virginia Heath’s latest book, His MistletoeWager, is out now!

His Mistletoe Wager

His Mistletoe Wager is released worldwide on 1st October 2017

In the middle of the summer heatwave of 2016, and halfway through writing my Wild Warriners series, my editor at Harlequin Mills and Boon asked me if I would like to do a Christmas book for them. I happily jumped at the chance but because I was already a third into A Warriner to Tempt Her and there was no way I was going to be able to turn a smallpox epidemic into a festive tale, I decided to write a standalone story for my publisher instead.

Sort of.

I say sort of because it is also a bit of a sequel to my second book, Her Enemy at the Altar although like all my books, you don't have to have read one to enjoy the others.

Thanks to several lovely messages from readers and quite a few comments from reviewers, I knew that some people, including me, wanted to see the tormented Aaron Wincanton and shrew-like Constance Stuart again. Fortunately, I gave Connie a younger brother in that book and so it was his story I decided to write as the sun singed my lawn and I melted at my computer.

Hal (Henry) Stuart, the newly minted Earl of Redbridge and notorious rake is a little out of sorts. Something is not quite right in his life but he can’t put his finger on what. His scandalous life has suddenly become very boring now that he has a title, largely because hunting for women has got too easy.

On a quest to find his missing vigour, he accepts a bet from his brother-in-law Aaron that he cannot steal five kisses in five separate places before Twelfth Night. One kiss for each of the berries on the sprig pinned to his lapel. Hal assumes he has to kiss five separate women, but Aaron decrees that all the kisses must be stolen from just the one woman.

Sullen Lizzie.

A committed spinster with a hatred for rakes and, unbeknownst to both Hal and the whole of the Ton, a very dirty secret she has kept hidden for five long years.

At times, these two characters had me laughing out loud as I wrote them and despite forming a fast and unlikely friendship, I couldn’t get Lizzie to allow herself to fall for Hal. Throw in a couple of meddling relatives, a menacing butler and three adorable and tenacious children and the end result, His Mistletoe Wager, was huge fun to write.

But in the end, a wager is a wager and it’s Christmas. And at Christmas there is always mistletoe…

Virginia Heath writes raunchy Regency romantic comedies for Harlequin Mills & Boon but her dog Trevor mostly writes her Facebook posts.