Title: First Time with a
Highlander
Author: Gwyn Cready
Series: Sirens of the Scottish, #2
Pubdate: October 6th, 2015
ISBN: 9781492601968
From
the “master of time travel romance”, award-winning author Gwyn Cready continues
her steamy Sirens of the Scottish Borderlands series.
She
needs a man—but only for a night
Be
careful what you wish for…
Serafina Seonag Fallon’s scoundrel of a
fiancé has left her with nothing, and she’s determined to turn the tables. If
she can come up with a ringer, she can claim the cargo he stole from her. But
the dashing man she summons from the future demands more than a night, and
Serafina finds it easier to command the seas under her feet than the crashing
waves he unleashes in her heart.
Gwyn
Cready is a writer of contemporary, Scottish, and
time travel romance. She’s been called “the master of time travel romance” and
is the winner of the RITA Award, the most prestigious award given in romance
writing. She has been profiled in Real Simple and USA Today, among others.
Before becoming a novelist, she spent 25 years in brand management. She has two
grown children and lives with her husband on a hill overlooking the magical
kingdom of Pittsburgh.
***
This October the second in Gwyn Cready’s Sirens of the Scottish
series, First Time with a Highlander, comes out! To celebrate, Gwyn’s here
to tell us a little bit more about the inspiration behind her time-travel
romances AND play a quick game of “Would You Rather.”
“People
often ask me why I like to write time travel romance, and it’s a two-part
answer, because there are really two questions in there—why do I like to write
romance, and why do I like to write time travel.
I
began to write with the intention of getting published in June, 1997 to honor
my younger sister, who was a poet and photographer and who had died suddenly
the month before. The sort of book I
wanted to write was a book like the one a friend had given me a few months
earlier—Outlander. At that time, I’d
never read a romance before, and I COULDN’T PUT IT DOWN. Jamie is the best sort
of hero—devoted, funny, brave, smart, and supportive of the heroine. I was so
hopped up on the first three Outlander
novels, it was pretty much all I could talk about in the spring of 1997—and it
was one of the things I talked to my sister about since her college boyfriend
had been named Jamie and like the heroine in Outlander, my sister’s name was Claire. It was the last
conversations I ever had with her.
So
there I am, in 1997, wanting to honor my sister with a book, and certain the
book I want to write is a romance like Outlander.
Time travel fit in nicely for me. Outlander
is a time travel novel, of course, but I’d been a time travel fan before that.
The Back to the Future movies are my
holy grail of time travel. I loved Somewhere
in Time, of course, as well as the Terminator
movies, Time After Time, and Groundhog Day. Time travel lets you
quickly throw your character into adversity and see if he/she sinks or swims.
The question you want readers asking in romance novels is “How, with all these
challenges, will the hero and heroine still end up together?” Time travel adds
another layer to that tension, specifically, “How will they end up together
when each is destined to be in his/her own time?” In my mind, one of the most
heroic things a character can do is give up his own time in order to be with
the person he/she loves, and that’s always a tender and gripping moment to
write in my books.
Which
brings us to First Time with a Highlander.
Serafina and Gerard were such fun characters to chase through a novel. As with Just in Time for a Highlander, the first
book in the Sirens of the Scottish
Borderlands series, I wanted to shake things up a bit by having the hero be
the person who travels to the past. Gerard is an ad man—and since I spent
twenty years working in brand management at a big pharma company, I know what
ad men are like. The women in this series hold positions of unusual power for
women in the eighteenth century, and Serafina is no exception. She inherited a
shipping concern from her father, but her blackguard of an ex-fiancé has run
the business into the ground. He’s ruined her socially and financially, but
Serafina is not one to take things lying down. She uses herbs she’s, ahem,
“borrowed” from a famed spell-caster to summon a man to help her claim the
cargo from the ship’s final voyage before her fiancé can get his hands on it.
She only needs a man for one night and…well, you can imagine what that leads to in the hands of an
inexperienced spell user. But Serafina is willing to pay the price—in fact,
she’s quite willing once the smart, dashing Gerard appears.
Would You
Rather Question: You can only hear one song for the rest of your life. Bohemian
Rhapsody or Ring of Fire?
How can you not a pick a song that begins with “Love is a burning
thing”? That line pretty much sums up half of the core essence of romance
novels, with the other half being summed up by a line from another of Johnny
Cash’s songs: “Because you’re mine, I walk the line.” That’s it, my friends.
That’s what it’s all about.
Buy Links:
Amazon: http://amzn.to/1Od18Lg
Apple: http://apple.co/1UTdm01
Chapters: http://bit.ly/1OVBKXF
Indiebound: http://bit.ly/1Lfl8eq
