Here Come The Grooms!

Remember last year when Liz Fielding, Kate Walker and I had books out in February and they were all about brides?

We got together and had a Here Come the Brides! contest, run by our lovely heroines.

Only our heroes, Theo, Max and Dom were not to be outdone. Before we knew it they'd organized a "Here Come the Grooms!" contest and basically took over. Well, they're men. What do you expect?

This year we decided to harness all that energy right from the start. So this year while the brides plan their weddings, my Flynn, Kate's Raul and Liz's Tom are going to be putting on a "Here Come the Grooms" contest, part II.

Who are these guys?

Well over the next few days, we'll get to that. You can meet each of them here, one by one. Or you can -- and I hope you will -- drop by Liz's blog and Kate's blog or websites and meet Tom and Raul there.

In the meantime, you've all seen the cover for One-Night Love Child (or if you haven't, scroll down to the entry below). Now let me introduce you to Flynn.

When Sara (and I) met Flynn Murray, she was nineteen, he was twenty-six and I was old enough to be writing my forty-ninth book. It was called The Great Montana Cowboy Auction, and the heroine was Polly McMaster, Sara's mother.

It was a single-title and there were a lot of characters -- most of them Polly's children, as I recall -- and the oldest was Sara.

Sara was a wonderful foil for Polly. Polly multi-tasked in her sleep. She had to. She was a widow with children, dogs, cats, a widowed mother, and an inability to say no to good ideas. Sara was organized, straightforward, focused, idealistic. She was going to go to medical school and save, if not the world, at least her little corner of it. She had Plans, Ambitions, Goals.

And then she met Flynn.

The first time they met she knocked him off his feet. Literally. And he returned the favor, figuratively and literally both.

Glib, charming, Irish to his toes, Flynn Murray was a journalist covering a story. He was a here-today, gone-tomorrow sort of guy. In fact he stuck around three days. Something of a record for a guy like Flynn.

And he was as enchanted with Sara as she was with him. Something between them just clicked.

But it was the wrong time. The wrong place. And he was the wrong man.

Flynn knew that, even if Sara didn't.

He wasn't a settling down sort of guy. He had places to go, things to do. And he was honorable enough to have left her untouched. Or he would have been if she hadn't showed up at his hotel room that last night and, in her honest Sara way, challenged him about what had been happening between them.

A man only had so much self control.

And that night Flynn reached the end of his. It was wrong, and he knew it. She'd hate him, he knew that, too. But how was he supposed to resist the woman who wrapped her arms around him and told him she wouldn't hate him at all?

Well, he didn't.

But he did leave. He had nothing to give her. And besides, Sara had goals and dreams of her own. He wasn't a part of them. He had no right to upset them.

But faced with Sara's idealism, he found the determination to find goals and dreams of his own.
And when he left he didn't look back. He spent the next five years covering stories from hot-spots all over the globe.

Fast forward six years and, just like John Lennon promised, life happened to both Flynn and Sara while they were making other plans.

Flynn, raised as the spare, suddenly became the heir and just a few months ago, the ninth Earl of Dunmorey.

And Sara -- well, Sara was almost as good a multi-tasker as her mother as she raised her five year old son.

Their paths might never have crossed again -- if a letter Sara letter wrote years ago hadn't finally caught up with him, and Flynn hadn't discovered he had a son.

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To enter the Here Come the Grooms! contest, you will need to answer three questions, one each from Flynn, Raul and Tom. Then go to each of our website contest pages (here's mine) and send us the answers. Or you can send an email to me through the 'contact Anne' tab on the sidebar of my webpage if you have trouble making the send entry gizmo work.

There will be three drawings on March 1st -- one by each hero -- and the winners get copies of all three books!

Flynn's question is: What story did he come to Montana to cover when he met Sara in the first place?

You can find the answer on my blog or in the excerpt to One-Night Love Child on my website. You can get Tom's and Raul's questions on Liz's and Kate's blogs. Have fun!