Before I could explain, he had continued down the page. “What about eel soup? And pickled tongue?” A pause followed. Then, with considerably more concern: “What is tripe? Is that a typo?” I told him it was research. He stared at me, then at the laptop, then back at me with the expression of a young man reevaluating every meal I had ever placed before him.

We eventually had tofu for dinner. You may wonder why, and the answer is that Regency food could be rather adventurous by modern standards. Yet the more I read, the more I admired one thing: when an animal was killed, very little went to waste. They ate the head, tongue, feet, heart, stomach—and several parts I am still trying not to picture. I would make a few modern safety adjustments, naturally. Though, after reading some of the original instructions, the novelist in me did begin to wonder whether a few dinner guests had simply had it coming.

Let me share some research and some really super funny things we found:

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Writing a book every five or six or even eight or nine weeks means I spend a great deal of time fixing things.

Not important things, naturally.

Only minor details such as spelling, history, ballroom etiquette, geography, emotional continuity, the occasional vanishing chair, and whether or not my hero has accidentally become clairvoyant.

This month, the manuscripts were especially determined to entertain themselves.

The first offender was a small but meaningful distinction:

saleroom: a room in which items are sold at auction
salesroom: a shop, a showroom

This is the kind of difference that seems small until one realizes one has placed a character in the wrong sort of room entirely.

(Thank you, dear editor, for spotting this!)

A saleroom suggests drama. Bidding. Whispered rivalries. A gentleman pretending he is not emotionally attached to a porcelain shepherdess while raising his paddle with increasing desperation.

A salesroom suggests commerce. Polite shelves. Possibly a clerk. Someone saying, “May I show you the latest imported silks?” with the calm confidence of a person who has never accidentally ruined a romantic subplot with vocabulary.

Naturally, I chose the wrong one.

Because why should a manuscript merely contain love, longing, and family secrets when it can also include a surprise auction?

Then came the spatial problem.

At one point, my hero appeared to see something through a wall.

Not an open doorway.

A window would have been still plausible enough.

But no, a wall.

Even my editor said she had to read it twice.

This was not, to be clear, part of the plot. I had not intended to write a Regency romance in which the hero’s secret advantage was X-ray vision. Though now that I think about it, that would make certain ballroom scenes alarmingly efficient.

He could know who was hiding behind the screen.

He could see which aunt was lurking in the corridor.

He could detect a compromised heroine, a stolen letter, and possibly a tray of ratafia all before breakfast.

But no. Alas. He was not gifted with supernatural perception. He was merely the victim of my draft-level geography, which had arranged the room in such a way that only a man with powers could have understood what was happening.

And then, not to be outdone, the heroine managed to hear something from the floor above.

Again, not through a conveniently open stairwell.

Not through a thin ceiling.

Not because someone shouted.

Apparently, she had simply developed the auditory gifts of a hunting owl.

Who says Regency characters cannot have superpowers?

Mine, evidently, acquire them by accident and lose them in edits.

For paid subscribers, welcome to the rest of this month’s manuscript rescue operation…

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Leah and Simon did.

More precisely, they began with a proposal that went terribly wrong.

Six months before the novel opens, Simon Kingsley visits Leah Hart’s family home and offers her what he believes she needs: security, protection, and enough money to save her father’s struggling jewelry business.

He has considered every practical detail.

He can pay the debts. He can protect Leah. He can give her a future in which she will never again have to fear losing her home or watching her father’s life’s work collapse.

It is a generous offer.

It is also exactly the wrong one.

The problem with offering rescue

Simon loves by making himself useful.

He is the man people approach when a loan must be arranged, an apprentice needs a position, or a family requires help. He has built his life around solving problems because he has learned to believe that usefulness is what makes him worthy.

So when he proposes to Leah, he tells her everything he can do for her.

He does not tell her how he feels.

Leah hears a man calmly arranging her future as though it were another account to be settled. She hears protection instead of partnership and obligation instead of love.

She refuses him.

And because both of them are proud, frightened, and far too skilled at concealing the truth, they spend the next six months pretending it did not break their hearts.

The woman who does not want to be saved

Leah has good reason to mistrust rescue.

She is a gifted jewelry designer whose work has been praised, sold, and stolen without her name ever appearing beside it. She knows what it is to be useful while remaining invisible.

Her father’s workshop is failing. Another jewelry house is profiting from her designs. The men with the power to intervene would rather preserve one another’s reputations than listen to a tradesman’s daughter.

Leah does not need someone else to decide what should become of her life.

She needs the freedom to claim it.

That is why she refuses Simon, even though part of her wants him. Accepting his proposal feels too much like admitting she cannot save herself.

Then a forged letter takes her to Thornfield Park, where she intends to uncover the conspiracy destroying her family.

And there she encounters the last man she expected to see.

Simon.

Except now he is calling himself the Duke of Dunmore.

Two people pretending to be someone else

Simon has entered Thornfield Park with a dead duke’s signet ring, a carefully rehearsed accent, and a title that does not exist.

Leah has arrived as a lady’s companion carrying a forged recommendation.

Each recognizes the other immediately.

Each can expose the other.

And each is searching for evidence connected to the same auction house, the same dead jeweler, and the same missing diamond.

That gave me one of my favorite romantic dynamics: two former almost-lovers trapped inside a mutual deception.

To everyone else at Thornfield, Simon is a duke and Leah is a servant.

To one another, they are painfully, dangerously themselves.

Leah notices that Simon’s new boots have not yet learned to belong to him. She hears his real voice beneath the aristocratic drawl. Simon sees the jeweler’s daughter beneath Leah’s plain companion’s dress—and recognizes the same courage that made her refuse him.

The disguises conceal them from the house.

They do not conceal them from each other.

Learning to stand beside her

Simon’s first proposal fails because he positions himself between Leah and the world.

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When we imagine a Regency tea table, it is easy to picture delicate china, silver spoons, beautiful gowns—and perhaps a neat tower of the familiar scones and sandwiches we associate with afternoon tea today.

But that picture belongs more to the Victorian era.

The formal custom of afternoon tea is generally associated with the 1840s, after the Regency peri…

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She can design a jewel.

She can draw its curves, calculate how the stones should sit, and understand how light will move across it when the woman wearing it turns her head.

But in 1813, talent does not guarantee that anyone will put Leah’s name on her work.

Her designs leave her father’s workshop in Hatton Garden under a man’s name. Wealthy clients praise the finished pieces without knowing that the first lines were drawn by a young Jewish woman working after midnight with graphite on her fingers.

Then Leah sees one of her designs in another jeweler’s catalog.

It is not merely similar. It is hers.

And she can prove it because of a tiny imperfection no one else would notice.

Women were working—even when records ignored them

Women participated in family trades throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They kept accounts, managed customers, purchased materials, trained children, supervised employees, and performed skilled work.

The historical difficulty is not proving that women worked.

It is discovering exactly what they did.

A business might be listed under the name of a husband, father, or master. An invoice might identify the shop rather than the individual craftsperson. A finished object might carry a registered maker’s mark without revealing every person who designed or constructed it.

The name that survives is not always the only hand that worked.

Jewelry is particularly difficult because many pieces were later altered, dismantled, or melted down. Stones were removed and reset as fashions changed. Gold retained its value even when the original design did not.

A silver teapot might survive intact for centuries.

A diamond necklace could be remade three times.

The women whose names did survive

Some female metalworkers did leave clear marks. Here’s some research:

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You can alter its description.

You can separate it from its papers.

You can bury it among hundreds of undervalued objects in a dead man’s estate.

You can arrange for the right bidder to acquire it at the right price—and then produce a catalog proving that everything happened openly, legally, and respectably.

By the time the auctioneer’s hammer falls, the theft no longer looks like theft.

It looks like a sale.

That realization shaped the mystery at the center of The Duke in Disguise.

A life reduced to lots

When I began researching Regency auctions, I was struck by the peculiar intimacy of an estate catalog.

A person dies, and suddenly a stranger can buy his dining table, his books, his tools, his wife’s jewelry, his bed curtains, and the chair in which he may have spent the final evening of his life.

Everything is separated, numbered, described, and assigned a value.

An entire existence becomes a list of lots.

For the family of a prosperous gentleman, this might mean paintings, silver, horses, wines, furniture, porcelain, and the contents of several houses. For a tradesman, it could mean something even more devastating: the sale of everything required to earn a living.

Tools.

Materials.

Stock.

Ledgers.

Unfinished commissions.

The work of decades could be dispersed in a single day.

That became personal for Leah Hart and Simon Kingsley because the estate being auctioned in the novel belongs to Nathan Weiss, a Jewish jeweler from Clerkenwell. His benches, stones, settings, tools, and records are not merely possessions. Together, they represent his reputation, livelihood, and life’s work.

Nathan is dead.

But what is being done to him is not finished.

The catalog creates the truth

An auction catalog appears to be a neutral document.

It tells prospective buyers what will be sold, provides the order of the lots, and offers descriptions that allow interested people to decide what they wish to inspect or bid upon.

But every description is also an argument.

Consider the difference between:

An old diamond brooch.

And:

A fine antique diamond brooch of uncommon workmanship, formerly the property of a distinguished noble family.

The object might be identical. The words around it are not.

Here’s what I did with this in my new book:

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Every novel begins with a question.

For The Duke in Disguise, mine was this:

What happens when a diamond appears in the historical record—and then vanishes?

Not a small stone, either. This was an Indian-cut diamond weighing 215¾ grains—nearly fifty-four carats—described as being of exceptional size and color.

And according to the advertisement offering it for sale in London in 1808, it had once belonged to Zeman Shah, King of Afghanistan.

Then it disappeared.

No famous name followed it through the nineteenth century. No triumphant buyer announced its acquisition. No museum displays it beneath glass today. As far as I have been able to discover, the historical record simply falls silent.

For a historian, that silence is frustrating. (Thank you so much to Susan for alerting me to this amazing conspiracy!)

For a novelist, it is irresistible.

The king who lost more than a diamond

Zeman Shah—also rendered Zaman Shah—ruled the Durrani Empire from 1793 until 1801. He inherited a kingdom created by his grandfather Ahmad Shah Durrani, whose territories had stretched across what is now Afghanistan and into parts of present-day Pakistan and India.

But Zeman Shah’s reign was plagued by rival claimants, shifting loyalties, and conflict among his own brothers. In 1801, he was overthrown by his brother Mahmud Shah, imprisoned, and blinded.

That last detail matters.

A king could be deposed. A king who had been blinded, however, was considered unfit to reclaim the throne. The act was not merely one of cruelty. It was political strategy.

And a king’s treasury was political, too.

Today, we tend to think of a diamond as a luxury: valuable, beautiful, and perhaps emotionally meaningful. In the courts of South and Central Asia, great gemstones could carry something more. They were portable declarations of power. They passed from ruler to ruler through inheritance, tribute, conquest, coercion, and theft.

To possess a celebrated royal stone was to possess a piece of the authority attached to everyone who had held it before.

That is why the provenance described in the 1808 advertisement caught my attention. The seller did not merely claim that this was an unusually fine diamond. The advertisement gave it a story: it had supposedly been taken from Zeman Shah’s crown during the struggle with his brother.

Whether every element of that sales story can be independently proved is another question. Auction advertisements were designed to arouse desire, then as now.

But the advertisement itself existed.

The diamond was offered for sale.

And after that, it apparently slipped out of sight.

Another royal diamond was traveling, too

The missing stone becomes even more intriguing when placed beside the history of the Koh-i-noor.

Paid subscribers, read on…

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They sit politely in a sentence, doing their work, filling up the room.

And then there are words that arrive with a candle in one hand and a key in the other.

Let me share some of my new favorites from Regency England with you before they even appear in my books…

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A reader recently bought my twelve-book bundle and then asked for a return within hours.

Because she realized the characters were Jewish.

And she told me she was not interested in Jews.

There are many possible answers to a sentence like that.

The polite one.

The furious one.

The customer-service one.

The one where you pretend it didn’t hurt because authors are supposed to be grateful for attention and gracious about rejection and somehow serene when someone looks at the people you have written with your whole chest and says, not them.

But here is the truest answer I have:

My books are not “about Jews” in the small way that sentence imagines.

They are about people standing outside a locked drawing room while the people inside praise civilization.

They are about a society that loved elegance, pedigree, good manners, polished silver, royal favor, and the performance of virtue — while quietly deciding who was allowed to belong.

They are about families who had to calculate every word.

Every accent.

Every name.

Every holiday.

Every marriage.

Every business risk.

Every kiss.

They are about what it costs to be tolerated but not embraced.

Useful but not equal.

Admired but not safe.

Near power but never fully protected by it.

And yes, in my books, those people are Jewish.

Not accidentally.

Not as decoration.

Not because I needed a “fresh twist” on Regency romance.

Because history did not begin with the Holocaust.

Because antisemitism did not begin in Germany.

Because Jewish fear did not begin with yellow stars, camps, or trains.

Because long before the catastrophes everyone agrees to mourn, there were quieter humiliations. Closed doors. Whispered warnings. Broken engagements. Business threats. Social ruin. Conversion pressure. Blackmail. “Good families” who would smile over tea and destroy you by supper.

That is the world my characters inhabit.

A world where love is never just love.

A proposal can be a rescue.

A secret can be a death sentence.

A ballroom can be more dangerous than a battlefield.

And a woman choosing the man she loves can become an act of rebellion.

So no, these books are not only for Jewish readers.

They are for anyone who has ever wondered why the rules were written before they arrived.

Anyone who has ever been told they were “welcome” as long as they became smaller.

Anyone who has ever learned to laugh at the right jokes, dress the right way, use the right words, hide the wrong parts, and pray no one notices the place where their real self is showing.

They are for the girl who was too foreign.

The boy whose name sounded wrong.

The family who was invited in but never trusted.

The woman who knew she was brilliant but was told to be grateful.

The person who has stood in a beautiful room and realized beauty does not mean mercy.

That is universal.

But it is universal because it is specific.

I will not make my characters less Jewish so they can be more “relatable.”

That is not how the human heart works.

We do not recognize ourselves in stories because the characters have been sanded down into blandness.

We recognize ourselves because someone, somewhere, dared to tell the truth deeply enough.

My books were written with Herzblut.

Blood of the heart.

Tears and sweat and years of research and the ache of knowing how many Jewish stories were erased, mocked, flattened, or turned into footnotes.

I wrote these books because I wanted Jewish characters who were not only victims.

Not only warnings.

Not only ghosts walking toward tragedy.

I wanted them clever.

Desired.

Stubborn.

Flawed.

Elegant.

Funny.

Sensual.

Terrified.

Brave.

I wanted them in silk.

In danger.

In love.

At the center of the story.

And perhaps that is the part that still unsettles some people.

Not that the characters are Jewish.

But that they refuse to stand politely at the edge of the page.

They take up space.

They want.

They scheme.

They inherit.

They kiss.

They win.

They survive beautifully.

And that, I think, is the real provocation.

Because when someone says, “I’m not interested in Jews,” what they may mean is: I am not used to seeing them as the beating heart of the story.

But they are the beating heart of mine.

And I will not apologize for that.

Because behind every one of my fictional families is a question I cannot stop asking:

What happens to love when society lets you live, but not fully belong?

And what happens when the people expected to disappear decide, instead, to become unforgettable?

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The doors have been opened before.

The chandeliers have already glittered.

The card tables have seen fortunes lost, hearts exposed, reputations threatened, and Mrs. Bessie Dove-Lyon — the Black Widow of Whitehall — doing exactly what she does best: knowing more than anyone wishes she did.

So the question becomes: how do you enter a house like that without rearranging what readers love?

You do not knock down the walls.

You find the hidden passage.

That, for me, was the real beginning of The Lyon’s Sweet Temptation.

Let me tell you more…

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I could have given Rosine a dance card and a pretty dress but I didn’t this time.

But when I sat down with The Lyon’s Sweet Temptation, the more obvious version of the story did not interest me as much as the stranger one.

The one behind the curtain peeking at the rich gamblers from a distance.

The one in the kitchen with flour-dusted hands.

The one at the chessboard with a trap in his mind more than in his life.

A gentleman at a gaming table may lose a fortune. Sander may lose the fragile life he has built piece by piece.

A kiss in a garden is romantic. So is a woman wanting her own bakery sign before she gives anyone her future. So is a man learning that protection becomes love only when it leaves room for choice.

The most interesting Regency stories often begin where the polite version of history stops looking.

That is why I chose a baker. Let me tell you more…

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A carriage at the door.

A lady descending a grand staircase.

A gentleman returning from war.

A widow stepping back into society.

A mysterious stranger taking a seat at the gaming table.

But in The Lyon’s Sweet Temptation, the two arrivals that mattered most to me were quieter.

Rosine Cassis comes to the Lyon’s Den (a famous gambling den in Dragonblade’s well-known series, i.e., a casino for the elite with a matchmaker patroness called Mrs. Dove-Lyon) from Strasbourg, with Alsace in her accent and survival in her hands.

Sander comes from much farther east, from the Pale of Settlement, carrying a chessboard, grief, discipline, and the habit of watching a room before trusting it.

Both of them are immigrants in London.

That is rare in Regency romance, and it immediately changed the emotional center of the book.

Let me tell you more about this…

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Regency romance has taught us to recognize a heroine by her entrance.

She appears at a ball. She descends a staircase. Her gown is noticed. Her gloves matter and her fan tells a story. Her dance card is as important as her pedigree. Somewhere nearby, a mother, aunt, companion, or lady’s maid is quietly weighing her prospects against the evening’s eligible gentlemen.

Someone whispers about her dowry, her family, her reputation, or the terrible danger of being seen with the wrong man beside a potted palm.

I love those heroines.

I have written them. I will write them again. There is a particular pleasure in placing a woman inside all those glittering constraints and watching her outwit them.

But Rosine Cassis (the heroine in my new book) arrived in my imagination through a different door.

She came through the kitchen.

Alsace still on her tongue because she’s an immigrant in London. Heat gathering at her back. Flour clinging to her sleeves. Her hands knowing yeast, raisins, cardamom, lemon, sugar, and the kind of survival that must be practiced daily until it begins to look like skill.

That was the first thing I knew about her.

She was working.

And work changes the shape of a love story.

Let me tell you how…

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There is something delicious about a Regency hero who knows how to wait.

I don’t mean idleness. I mean the controlled patience of a chess player.

The kind that watches the room’s goings on with focus.

The kind that understands when to advance, when to hold, when to sacrifice, and when the quietest move is the one that changes everything.

That is Sander.

In my new book, The Lyon’s Sweet Temptation, Sander is one of Mrs. Dove-Lyon’s wolves (guards have these names only) at the Lyon’s Den. He guards the house, watches the doors, reads the guests, and understands that a gambling hell is driven by far more than cards or dice. Appetite moves through those rooms. So does desperation, vanity, secrets, and power.

And sometimes, chess.

Mrs. Dove-Lyon calls chess “wit against wit,” which is exactly why it belongs in the Lyon’s Den. A chessboard may look more respectable than a gaming table, but respectability has always been one of London’s prettiest disguises.

A card table can ruin a man loudly.

A chessboard can expose him quietly.

That is why I loved making Sander a chess master. He does not storm through every room with a sword drawn. He has no need for that. His strength is restraint. His gift is attention. His danger is precision.

Then he meets Rosine Cassis.

Rosine is a Jewish baker from Alsace whose hands know sugar, yeast, cardamom, lemon, and survival. She works in the kitchens below the Lyon’s Den, creating the sweets that tempt patrons who may never bother to ask who made them.

Sander sees her.

He sees the woman behind the trays. The ambition beneath the flour. The future she is determined to build with her own hands.

That is where the romance deepens for me.

A chess player can make a wonderful protector.

But love asks for more than protection.

Love asks him to learn partnership.

The most romantic move is sometimes knowing when to stand beside someone instead of in front of her.

Sander wants to keep Rosine safe. Rosine wants to build something that belongs to her: her own bakery, her own sign, her own name on the door.

Those desires do not begin as enemies.

But they do collide.

Safety can become too small if it is built like a cage. Love can lose its beauty if it asks a woman to trade away her independence. And in this story, the board is larger than either Sander or Rosine first understands.

The Lyon’s Sweet Temptation is now available for preorder. If you love clever heroes, ambitious heroines, Jewish Regency romance, and the dangerous world of Mrs. Dove-Lyon’s gambling hell, I hope you’ll step into the Den with me.

Here’s a deeper look behind the scenes and my work:

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Silk gowns. Candlelight. Carriages in the mist. Drawing rooms full of sharp words and sharper glances. Gaming tables where fortunes change hands. Ballrooms where one dance can alter the course of a life.

I love all of that.

Truly, I do.

There is a reason I keep returning to this era. It is beautiful on the surface and fascinating underneath it. The rules were elaborate. The manners were polished. The scandals were delicious. And every room had a door someone was not supposed to open.

But the Regency was never only ballrooms.

It was also kitchens.

Staff passages.

Back staircases.

Shopfronts with names painted carefully on glass.

And places like the Lyon’s Den, where the glittering world above stairs depends entirely on the people working, watching, cooking, guarding, listening, calculating, and surviving below it.

That is the world I wanted to step into with The Lyon’s Sweet Temptation.

If you know my Lyon’s Den books, you already know Mrs. Bessie Dove-Lyon, the Black Widow of Whitehall. She runs a Regency-era gambling hell with more power, secrets, and nerve than most men in London would know what to do with.

At the Lyon’s Den, wagers are made. Reputations tremble. Lovers find themselves cornered by fate. And Mrs. Dove-Lyon always knows far more than anyone realizes.

But in this book, I wanted to ask a different question.

What happens when the danger does not merely come to the gaming tables?

What happens when it walks straight into the house?

The Lyon’s Sweet Temptation is about Rosine Cassis, a Jewish baker from Alsace, and Sander, a Jewish chess master and one of the Den’s protectors. They are not dukes and debutantes. They are not moving through London from one assembly room to the next, wondering who will ask for the next dance.

They are working.

They are watching.

They are hiding parts of themselves because the world has taught them that visibility can be dangerous.

And still, they want what anyone would want.

A home.

A future.

A place to belong.

A life where love does not require disappearance.

The most interesting stories often begin where the ballroom ends.

Rosine’s world is heat, yeast, cardamom, sugar, lemon peel, and careful hands. Her pastries tempt the same patrons who may never bother to ask who made them. But her baking is not merely pretty. It is not decorative. It is her skill, her livelihood, her pride, and her plan for independence.

She dreams of her own bakery.

Her own sign.

Her own name on the door.

And for a woman like Rosine, that is not a small dream.

It is everything.

Sander’s world is different, but just as dangerous. He understands rooms the way a chess player understands a board. He notices exits, threats, patterns, traps, and the small moves other people overlook. He does not protect loudly. He protects by seeing what others miss.

And because this is the Lyon’s Den, chess belongs beautifully in the middle of the story.

A chess match looks civilized. Quiet, even. Two people sit across a board and move carved pieces while everyone pretends it is only a game.

But every move is a threat.

Every sacrifice has a cost.

Every advantage has to be earned.

That is the Regency I love writing most: the one where wit matters, where appearances deceive, where a quiet person may be the most dangerous one in the room.

Of course, there is still romance. Let me tell you about that…

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I am much more comfortable talking about characters, history, research, book releases, plots, villains, impossible love stories, and the occasional Regency scandal.

But today I want to say something plainly.

It has been a rough season (year!) for authors.

Sales are down for many of us. Ads are more expensive. Vi…

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Not always accurate.

But honest.

A cover will look you straight in the eye and say, Here is the sort of trouble you are about to enjoy.

This is why blood dripping from a gun does not usually say Regency romance.

It says murder.

Possibly revenge.

Possibly a man named something very futuristic who has unfinished business in an alley.

But a Regency romance? We need different signals.

A cravat doing its best.
A waistcoat under emotional strain.
A garden arch.
A ballroom.
A man staring as though love has inconvenienced him terribly.

The cover is the first promise.

Sweet romance whispers. Steamy romance leans closer. Victorian covers often feel a little heavier, darker, more velvet and consequence. Regency has light, polish, gloves, scandal, and the delicious sense that someone’s reputation may be ruined before supper.

And then there is the Lyon’s Den (published by Dragonblade).

The Lyon’s Den is its own little best and I’m fortunate enough to have contributed a few books to this amazing series.

It is not merely “a handsome man in historical clothing.”

It is a wager.

A bargain.

A locked room where everyone is pretending to be civilized.

So my Lyon’s Den covers need to say: yes, he is handsome, but please do not mistake that for harmless.

Because my heroes do have things in common.

Good looks, obviously. We are not here to be noble.

But also integrity.

Intelligence.

A private code.

A dangerous ability to think quickly.

And, hidden under the tailoring and tension, a soft heart for exactly one woman.

Do the men on the covers look exactly like the men in my head?

Absolutely not.

The heroes in my head are impossible. They move differently. They speak differently. They have one very specific expression when the heroine sees through them, and no cover model has yet volunteered to be emotionally destroyed in precisely the correct way.

But that is the fun of it.

The cover gives us the doorway.

The book gives us the room.

The hero?

The hero becomes yours.

Maybe you keep the cover version. Maybe you change his eyes. Maybe you make him more dangerous, more tender, more tired, more amused. Maybe you ignore the cover completely and build him from one line of dialogue.

I love that.

And because these Lyon’s Den covers are such a delicious little gallery of masculine problems, I thought we should peek at them properly.

PAID SUBSCRIBERS — let’s look at these men one by one.

Who looks dangerous? Who looks sweet? Who looks like he would absolutely ruin your life but only after asking whether you had eaten? And which cover hero is secretly holding the softest heart?

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I am behind.

Not because I disappeared.

Not because I ran out of ideas.

Not because the stories went quiet.

Actually, it’s the opposite.

I am behind because the stories are loud.

There is always another character tapping on the glass. Another family secret. Another historical rabbit hole. Another scene that begins as “just a small moment” and then decides, ve…

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Mine has his daughter.

If you read A Taste of Gold, you’ve already met the kind of man Theresa comes from—the kind who wears refinement like a mask and treats damage as a right. In A Name for Love, I wanted to do something that makes a story feel dangerous from the inside out: I wanted the heroine to be born in the house that did the harm.

Because that’s where the real question lives. Not “can she be loved?” but “can she be believed?” Can she step into a new life without being reduced to the worst thing her family ever did? Can she survive a world that loves bloodlines, surnames, and the comforting lie that goodness is inherited?

Theresa’s childhood is Vienna: polished halls, marble steps, the appearance of safety. It’s also the private education of a girl who learns early that grandeur doesn’t mean gentleness. She grows up watching her father and brother move through society with the sort of protection money and station buy—what she calls, with bitter precision, “the crimes they got away with due to their stations.” And she understands something most people never have to learn: a family name can be a doorway, or it can be a cage. Sometimes it’s both at once.

So when she reaches England, she does the bravest thing she knows how to do.

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Theresa isn’t the sort of Regency heroine who tumbles into trouble by accident. She walks into it with her eyes open—quietly, deliberately—because she’s learned that survival isn’t a matter of luck. It’s a skill. It’s a discipline. It’s knowing exactly which parts of yourself must be hidden in order to keep the rest alive.

Once, she walked polished halls in Vienna. Now she scrubs floors in Oxford, slipping through the Bodleian (I shared more about this famous library earlier this month!) like a shadow with purpose. By day, she is useful and forgettable: the kind of girl men glance past because their eyes are trained to ignore anyone without a title. By night, she becomes something else entirely. She studies. She reads. She keeps Ovid close not out of sentiment, but out of hunger—because knowledge is one of the few things no one can confiscate unless they’re willing to lay hands on your mind.

Most nights she sleeps tucked into a forgotten corner above the library, beneath the eaves, in a narrow nest that smells of vellum and old ink. It isn’t grand, and it certainly isn’t safe, but it’s hers. And for a girl who grew up in a house where power was performance and cruelty was currency, having any scrap of “hers” feels like a miracle she doesn’t quite trust.

If you’ve read A Taste of Gold, you already know why Theresa had to run. You know what kind of man her father is: the kind who can ruin lives and still stand in the light as if he’s done nothing at all. Theresa is his daughter, which means she learned early what it costs to share a roof with a villain. You don’t just endure that kind of household—you learn to disappear while smiling, to become fluent in silence, to understand that a family name can be both shield and weapon.

So she changes her name the moment she reaches England.
And this is what it becomes…

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