Like any writer, I’m often asked where I get the inspiration for my stories. Sir Frank Dicksee’s painting, The Mirror, spun off a world of possibilities in my head.

Is the woman in the painting admiring her face in the mirror? Or have we caught her in a moment of deeper soul searching?

What do you see?

Book Two, HEIRESS OF SEDUCTION, is a Beauty and the Beast tale of love and retribution in the Regency-era Highlands. Christiane MacKinnon, our heroine and the second of the HIGHLAND HEIRESSES, is considered an incomparable beauty, but she’s never put much store in such things. She’s no woman to sit around looking in a mirror. Suitor after suitor has pursued her, never peering deeper than her face and rumored wealth. She’s damn well grown tired of the attention. For all that, Regency-era conventions reach even to the Highlands when you’re the daughter of a laird. Christiane sees little recourse but to marry. She has no illusions she’ll find a love match.

Enter Kendrick MacLaren, the earl of Calechcraig, a man like no other she’s met. He has a way of looking at her as if to pierce beneath her skin. Christiane begins to unlock the truths of his guarded past. She finds wounds she hadn’t imagined — physical wounds and scars deeper still — and a sensuous spiral of passion that he initiates, then seems hell-bent to end as soon as desire becomes a two way seduction. In such a moment, any woman might seek out a mirror to show her what’s locked in her heart. . . as surely as she could hope it might reveal what’s locked in his.

~ Jenna