Title: Love in a Dangerous Season
Author: Gloria Gay
Genre: Regency Historical Romance
Release Date: January 21, 2015
Cover Artist: Killion Group
Summary:For her insulting behavior toward the Earl of Ashcom, on whom her family depends for subsistence, beautiful Fantine Delmere earns for herself an unwanted London season and is forced to leave her beloved Evergreen and venture into the hard glare of the heartless haut ton she abhors. But Fantine’s arrival awakens jealousies and dangerous forces are put into motion…
Fantine struggled in Ashcom’s arms as he pressed his mouth to hers, but to no avail. Her strength pitted against his was but a sigh to a powerful gale. Then even against her will she felt her treacherous lips responding hungrily to his bruising lips that tasted of recently sipped coffee and felt a rush of passion course madly through her limbs as he parted her lips forcibly and thrust his tongue into her mouth.
A thrilling rush of sensation shot out throughout her body, making her listless.
For a while he kissed her, hard and with a desperate hunger answered in measure by Fantine. He tasted the chocolate in her mouth and inhaled the sweet light scent he had chosen for her. He felt a tremor shoot out in sparks throughout his body and a strong response in his loins.
Hating his reaction to her and his weakening resolve, he let go of her suddenly and still holding her by her shoulders looked angrily into her eyes.
"Have you ever been kissed by a moneyed title, Miss Delmere? Well now you have." And with that he turned on his heel and strode out of the breakfast room.
I fell in love with Jane Austen’s books, in particular Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey, which combines Regency and gothic.
When writing a book, what is your favorite part of the creative process (outline, plot, character names, editing, etc)?
My favorite part of the creative process is when my characters begin to form in the book because I have placed them in situations where they reveal themselves through their actions. That is a very fulfilling part of the writing for me because they begin to “act on their own” so to speak and many of the problems of the plot get solved simply because I have developed the character in such a way that he or she acts in character and helps me develop the plot. This goes as well for the villains. My Regency romances always have villains you love to hate.
When reading a book, what genre do you find most interesting/intriguing?
I love Regency romances, mysteries and romantic suspense. Curling up in bed with a book or my Kindle and trembling with expectation when reading of a wonderfully delicious hero or being thrilled by an excellent mystery is one of the best pleasures in life.
If you could co-author with any author, past or present, who would you choose?
I think that for Regencies of the past I would love to write one with Georgette Heyer and for Regencies of the present I would love to co-author one with Lisa Kleipas. I love her wallflower series. I also loved to read Mary Balogh and Marion Chesney.
Have you always wanted to write or did it come to you ʺlater in lifeʺ?
I got a novel as a gift for art excellence at a Catholic academy for girls where I spent grade school. The nuns did not permit any kinds of books except history, geography, math etc., and that novel made me see a world outside of the contained world I knew. I began to write a novel of my own. Of course I abandoned it after a few pages but the wish to be a writer stayed in my mind. Later, it came back to life when I read the first line of Rebecca. That was when I started to write a gothic novel, and I wrote until I was able to write “The End” on it.
From an early age I was drawn to painting and writing. Both have always been linked for me throughout the different stages of my life—studies, work, marriage, children, grand-children. Curiously enough it was a novel given to me as a prize for art excellence at the Catholic nuns’ academy where I studied through sixth grade that I was introduced to literature. Up until that time I only knew books as history, math, etc. Those nuns were very strict: novels only as a prize! I was amazed that a book could open doors into imagined worlds. I probably thought, as a nine-year-old, that movies just appeared on the screen by magic.
From that day forth I would make up stories to tell my brothers and my sister. Later on I started to put the stories down on paper. Then among the many novels I read I started one day to read “Rebecca” by Daphne Du Maurier. That first line in the novel: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…” was the spark that drew me toward serious writing, first the gothic novels popular at the time and then when I searched for more romance than mystery, to the novels of Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer.
Regency romance became my genre and I self-published four, then two more with a traditional publisher, Boroughs Publishing Group, and two with Amazon’s Kindle Direct. And although I will probably always write Regencies, I am also branching out to romantic suspense and will soon be publishing two of those and, hopefully, re-write the first gothic novel I wrote and abandoned many years ago.
