That scandalous runaway bride - Kandy Shepherd

Have you ever experienced a moment where you realise the action you take next might very well become a defining point of your life? 

For Nikki Lucas, the heroine of my July release for Harlequin Romance, Best Man and the Runaway Bride, that moment comes when she realises she simply can’t go ahead with her wedding. Despite all the expectations of her friends and family—not to mention the groom!—she decides to bail. She begs best man Max Conway to help her flee from the wedding—straight into scandal

North America edition

 It’s bad enough she ran away from her wedding, but handsome Max is one of the world’s top tennis players and a celebrity. People are convinced they’d been having an affair!

The repercussions of that impulsive decision change everything for Nikki and Max—and gets right in the way when love starts to blossom.

Australia and New Zealand edition

Have you ever made an impulsive decision that changed your life? A relationship? A job? Travel? Thirty years ago, I went out on a limb to hire someone for a job on a magazine where I worked. Little did I know that her room-mate would become my husband!

Please leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you! If you want to be in the draw to win a signed paperback copy of Best Man and the Runaway Bride, also include your email address.

Kandy Shepherd’s Best Man and the Runaway Bride is a July 2018 release from Harlequin Romance in North America; Mills & Boon True Love in the UK; and Mills & Boon Forever Romance in Australia and New Zealand. 

Kandy Shepherd is a multi-published, award-winning author of contemporary romance and women’s fiction. She lives on a small farm in the Blue Mountains near Sydney, Australia, with her family and a menagerie of four-legged friends.

Visit Kandy at her website

www.kandyshepherd.com

Connect with Kandy on Facebook, Twitter,Pinterestand Instagram

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Best Man and the Runaway Bride - Kandy Shepherd

One of my very favourite things about being a romance writer is I get to write the kind of stories I  love to read!

 I've always been a sucker for a runaway bride story (or movie!) and thoroughly enjoyed writing my July release for Harlequin Romance, Best Man and the Runaway Bride. There's a scene very like this one in the book, only the bride heroine fleeing her wedding ends up in the arms of the best man when running in her bare feet becomes a little difficult!

I also love an exotic setting, preferably an island. Last year I had an amazing vacation on the small Indonesian island of Nusa Lembongan – just the right romantic setting for an important part of this story! In fact I wrote some of the story while I was on the island—a writer really takes a break!

Here’s the blurb for Best Man and the Runaway Bride :  

Scandal at a society wedding!

Can he resist the runaway bride?

After helping Nikki Lucas flee her high-society wedding, privacy-loving best man Max Conway never expected to be accused of having an affair with the bride! As the media scandal dies down, he escapes to a remote island—and comes face-to-face with Nikki! Their connection is undeniable but she’s completely off-limits. Yet as the sun sets in paradise, both are struggling to resist…

Kandy Shepherd’s Best Man and the Runaway Bride is a July 2018 release from Harlequin Romance in North America; Mills & Boon True Love in the UK; and Mills & Boon Forever Romance in Australia and New Zealand. 

Kandy Shepherd is a multi-published, award-winning author of contemporary romance and women’s fiction. She lives on a small farm in the Blue Mountains near Sydney, Australia, with her family and a menagerie of four-legged friends.

Visit Kandy at her website

www.kandyshepherd.com

Connect with Kandy on Facebook Twitter Pinterest and Instagram

Greek Tycoon’s Mistletoe Proposal - Kandy Shepherd

I’m delighted to share the cover of my November 2016 release for Harlequin Romance, Greek Tycoon’s Mistletoe Proposal.

Isn’t the cover model gorgeous? That’s my heroine, runaway bride Ashleigh Murphy and she’s obviously lapping up the sweet nothings being whispered in her ear by gorgeous Greek billionaire Lukas Christophedes. Lukas doesn’t actually have a beard in the book, but some sexy designer stubble does come into it!

I was asked to write this story as part of the Maids Under the Mistletoe Christmas continuity series. It features four consecutive books (mine is number two) with heroines who are working as maids for an elite employment agency over the Christmas-New Year period.

The story is set in snowy London at Christmas

My story Greek Tycoon’s Mistletoe Proposal is an engagement of convenience story with a Pretty Woman type of makeover which I thoroughly enjoyed writing. It’s set in London, England over Christmas. Although I live in Australia I used to live in London and it was fun to revisit favourite places through my characters’ eyes.

Here’s the blurb:

A proposal of convenience!

When billionaire Lukas Christophedes finds maid Ashleigh Murphy gatecrashing his mansion, he strikes a bargain: if Ashleigh acts as Lukas’s girlfriend to help him close a deal, she can stay until the New Year!

For newly single Ashleigh, agreeing to keep hearts off the table sounds easy...until the line between what’s real and what’s for show starts to blur! And as Christmas approaches, all Ashleigh is wishing for is a different, much more heartfelt, proposal...

I’m in awesome author company for this series: Christy McKellen with A Countess for Christmas (October 2016); Scarlet Wilson with Christmas in the Boss’s Castle (December 2016); and Jessica Gilmore with Her New Year Baby Secret (January 2017).

From left: Jessica Gilmore, Christy McKellen, Scarlet Wilson, Kandy Shepherd

Even though I live on the other side of the world from these authors, I know them all—we’ve spent some fun times at writers’ conferences, and I love that we’ve been able to work together on this series.

Greek Tycoon’s Mistletoe Proposal is now available for pre-order.

Kandy Shepherd is an award-winning author of contemporary romance and women’s fiction. She lives on a small farm in the Blue Mountains near Sydney, Australia, with her family and a menagerie of four-legged friends.

Visit Kandy at her website

www.kandyshepherd.com

Connect with Kandy on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest

My Friend, My Co-Author

By Joanne Rock

Catherine Mann & Joanne Rock at RWA

I’m so excited to be writing a book with my critique partner, Catherine Mann, this month. We’ve worked together—reading every sentence one another has penned—for almost eighteen years. I can always keep track of the date since I’d just had my second son the first time I went over to Cathy’s house for lunch and we embarked on the coolest partnership and friendship. The baby I’d been rocking over that lunch turns eighteen in April and my critique partnership with my fabulous friend has spawned a fun new creative direction—writing a series together.

Like all great ideas, it seemed to jump from our brains simultaneously. We might have been talking about the pressures to write more and faster in the current marketplace. Or we might have been discussing stories we’d love to write and hadn’t found the time. But something prompted the spark of an idea—what if we co-wrote some stories for fun?

Snapped this pic on a long ago road trip 

Because at the heart of the business still rests the creative joy of writing. It's a tricky balance when you turn your creative outlet into your work. New pressures are applied. Deadlines become important, looming beasts. “Productivity” enters your vocabulary and makes you wish you’d never heard it. So it’s important to peel away the work environment around our beloved craft sometimes and remember why we started in the first place—for the sheer joy of telling a story and entertaining a reader with the effort.

Before either Cathy or I sold our first books, we dreamed about what it would be like to have readers who sought out our books. We worked hard to tell the best stories possible—to make our writing engaging and our storytelling unique so that an editor had to buy our manuscripts. We’d share fun books we’d read and dissected what made them great. But over the years, as we’ve each pursued our writing dreams, we have less opportunities to call one another and blurt out a story premise because it’s so new and exciting. Part of that is because we've each been blessed to find readers and audience so we blurt out fun ideas to them! But it’s also because our storytelling fell into a rhythm and pattern.

That’s good, of course. Yet it’s always fun to mix things up as a creative person. To dig deep. To reinvent yourself—if only a little facet of yourself—and see what else you can do. To try a new process and find out what it yields. Working on a story together has done all of those things for me. Cathy called me yesterday and the ideas she brought to the work-in-progress were so exciting. She took the story in new directions, added fun levels I hadn’t thought of, and forced me to up my storytelling game. Even eighteen years into our professional partnership, she’s teaching me things. I hope I’m inspiring her right back.

All of this is to say, I’m really excited about the new Runaway Brides series Cathy and I are rolling out on April 7^th (would you believe that’s my middle son’s birthday? Kismet!). Tule Publishing is working on gorgeous covers for us that we’ll share soon. But first, we have some finishing touches to put on a series that has pulled from the very best of us and given us a chance to savor the creative fire of something new.

***Have you ever had the pleasure of working with a good friend? Or has your work led you to important people in your life? Share with me today on the boards and I’ll send one random poster a copy of my upcoming Harlequin Superromance, NIGHTS UNDER THE TENNESSEE STARS!  

                                                                                                                                                                    

What’s your favorite romance fantasy?

Whenever I imagine my dream vacation, it’s always a variation of the same scenario. Tropical island. Clear aquamarine waters lapping up onto long stretches of white sand. Palm trees leaning toward the shoreline. Brilliant tropical flowers. Endless sun. A gorgeous dark-haired man, with rippling muscles, wearing next to no clothes—

Whoa! Stop right there. Where did he come from? My husband is blond, and of course he’d be the star of my vacation fantasy.

Sorry about that, darling hub. My romance novel fantasy butted into my vacation dreams… Which is what happens to authors. I'm sometimes surprised to read back over my work and see themes and issues from my own life interlaced through my story. I didn't intend them, they just got there via my subconscious.

The tropical paradise thing, for example. In Home Is Where the Bark Is, Serena and Nick plan to honeymoon in Hawaii where Serena will pose in a swimming pool of chocolate for a commercial. Hmm. Don’t ask me where that particular fantasy comes from! Come to think of it, chocolate seems to sneak into everything I write...

My newest story The Castaway Bride has all the above tropical island wonders and, come to think of it, chocolate as well. The dark-haired fantasy lover? Well of course!

I so enjoyed writing Matt Slade. He’s succeeded in the business world against tough odds but he’s been betrayed by people he trusted. That’s made him cynical about love but there’s a wonderful chivalrous streak in his nature that keeps fighting its way to the surface—especially when runaway bride Cristy Walters is close by. He helps her escape from her cheating bridegroom only for them to end up shipwrecked on an uninhabited island. Cristy has her own issues—in particular she doesn’t trust lust—and boy does she have to struggle against her feelings for hot hunk Matt!

Is there a dog in The Castaway Bride? That’s one of the first questions people ask me. (My Berkley Sensation books, Love is a Four-Legged Word and Home Is Where the Bark Is, have lots of dogs in them.)

Yes and no. Matt is taking time out on his yacht. He’d love to have his beloved black Labrador Jake sailing with him, but Jake gets seasick and can’t be on board. Matt has to Skype his dog to keep in touch. So Jake is part of the story but never actually appears on the pages. Needless to say my heroine Cristy Walters finds Matt’s devotion to his dog endearing. Oh, and there’s a tame dragon lizard named Sam who plays a part in the plot.

But the focus of The Castaway Bride is purely on two people, both emotionally wounded in their own ways, finding passion and true love in a tropical island paradise. Alert: it’s a tad steamier than my doggy books.

The Castaway Bride is my first foray into the exciting world of indie publishing and is available only as an e-book at Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble and other e-book retailers. It’s on sale for the introductory price of $0.99c (that’s another thing I love—a bargain!) But I’m giving away a free copy to anyone who comments here over the weekend, via a coupon for Smashwords where you can download the book in a format to suit any e-reader or PC.

Do you have a fantasy vacation destination? A favorite romance scenario? I’d love to hear your comment. Be sure to leave your email address if you would like a free download of The Castaway Bride.

http://www.kandyshepherd.com

Photos courtesy of Tahiti Tourisme and Tourism Queensland.