Please give Karen a warm welcome!
Beauty and the Beast is my favorite fairytale. I love how the ugly, furious beast is by turns irritated, baffled, and then befuddled by the beautiful, charming, and ultimately feminine Beauty. As I married a gruff and very masculine Hot Cop, I can understand how Beauty came to fall in love with the Beast, a man who found drinking tea from a ridiculously tiny cup while talking about 'genteel subjects' an exasperating and difficult task.
I'm not a super romantic woman, myself, but I do love frilly things. I love shoes - lots and lots of shoes, and I adore my delicate china tea cups. So while I don't ask Hot Cop to 'take tea' with me, I do make sure he's had occasion to dress up and join polite society, just to smooth off a few of his sharper edges. In return, he's taught me the wonders of hiking and how to cook chef-quality foods on a grill, and now both are now on my list of favorite things.
HOW TO ENTICE AN ENCHANTRESS (available September 17th) is my take of a Regency-era Beauty and the Beast tale. Instead of Disney's montage of Beauty's changes to the castle that eventually win Beast over, we get to see how Beauty's expectations of love change as she gradually falls in love with Beast, and how our Beast is slowly tamed, not by learning how to hold a delicate tea cup, but from the deep, deep love he has for a truly worthwhile and amazing woman.
**Sigh** What can be better than true love? Nothing, I tell you. Absolutely NOTHING.
What's your favorite fairytale? Which one is closest to your real life and how? I hope you'll all enjoy HOW TO ENTICE AN ENCHANTRESS!
What's your favorite fairytale? Which one is closest to your real life and how? I hope you'll all enjoy HOW TO ENTICE AN ENCHANTRESS!
One commenter on today's post will win the audiobook version of How to Pursue a Princess (book 2 in the Duchess Diaries series) and some Karen Hawkins swag. Best of luck!
Reclusive Viscount Kirk, horribly scarred by a tragic accident that stole the life of his beloved first wife, is a man defined by fury. For years he’s eschewed society, growing abrupt and curmudgeonly. But now, when he’d given up on life, he’s fallen madly in love with the refreshingly naive daughter of his neighbor, dainty and charming Dahlia Balfour. Desperate to win her attention, Kirk calls in a favor from the Duchess of Roxburghe and asks that she transform him into a fashionable suitor for Dahlia’s hand. But what’s easy to change on the outside, isn’t as easy to change on the inside…
Dahlia’s always dreamed of a fairytale romance. Although Viscount Kirk is only seven years her senior, because of his cantankerous ways and lack of social graces she thinks of him as her “older neighbor,” and is blissfully unaware that he sees her as anything other than an acquaintance. She is shocked to see him at the duchess’s grand house party, trying to fit with the very societal rules he so frequently mocks. Surprised by his attention, irritated at his bald honesty, and intrigued that he finds her worth the effort, Dahlia regards Kirk as the opposite of Prince Charming. Without the pretty words and grand gestures she yearns for, can true love find its way into her unwilling heart?
