Gaelen Foley has become one of the hottest new writers in romance, enticing her readers with bold love stories that burn with emotional intensity. Now in new novel, she presents her most unforgettable hero yet, the irresistible Lord of Fire.
After years of preparation, he has baited his trap well, luring the depraved members of Society into his devil?s playground so he can earn their trust and uncover their secrets. Yet no one in London suspects that Lord Lucien Knight is England?s most cunning spy, an officer who has sacrificed his soul for his country. Now an unexpected intruder has invaded his fortress of sin, jeopardizing his carefully laid plans?and igniting his deepest desires.
Beautiful, innocent, Alice Montague finds herself at the mercy of scandalous Lord Lucien. But as he begins his slow seduction to corrupt her virtue, Alice glimpses a man tormented by his own choices, a man who promises her nothing except his undeniable passion. . .
This book gave me my first and hopefully last bout of writer’s block.
In hindsight, it’s easy to see the main reason for this: It was a very complicated plot and Lucien was an extremely complex man to unravel. It’s hard to write a book about a character who’s about ten times smarter than you! Lucien put me off writing spies indefinitely, LOL. When you write about a spy, you have to give him essentially two separate lives—the life and personality he adopts as his “cover” and his real life and personality. That means double the research, for one thing. Moreover, Lucien is a seething cauldron of inner conflict.
He adores his twin brother, Damien, for example, (hero of Lord of Ice) but he’s also not quite resolved his sibling rivalry with him. He’s been in the background all his life, but now the great Damien is breaking down before his eyes, a victim of post-traumatic war stress. Unlike Damien the famous war-hero, Lucien sacrifices any possibility of intimacy in his life by accepting the job of an undercover operative.
Damien won’t get close to any woman, while Lucien can’t. While Damien gets all the glory, Lucien can’t even tell people about his role in protecting the homeland. He so desperately wants to be known, but he’s afraid the moment he is known, he will be rejected.
In the book, he keeps using charm to throw out deception after deception to keep the heroine at arm’s length but yet he still wants to keep her attention; not very fair, is it? Alice didn’t think so, either. This was a character unwilling to reveal himself to either his heroine or his author.
For five months I tried to nail him down, rewriting the first hundred-fifty pages over and over and over again. At this point, with a few years gone by, I don’t remember what brought about the breakthrough. I think I just gave up and walked away from the story, and in a state of utter defeat, it started coming clear to me. It’s always darkest before the dawn, right? Then I was back on my feet and running to the computer, writing furiously. I could almost hear him laughing at me, the blackguard.
Once, I finally had him, though, the writing went quickly. I’ve had a large number of readers tell me this one’s their favorite of my books so far, and that makes all the angst worth it. But I’m still too traumatized to write any spy stories for a while yet!
