The Boss's Christmas Seduction

If I tell you that Christmas is coming, do you promise not to panic? Because this early taste of Christmas is just as delicious as the cover promises. I devoured it in a single sitting last Sunday afternoon and recommend it to anyone who loves a sexy, romantic, emotionally-charged category romance.

Here is the cover blurb:

From inside her cubicle walls, Holly Christmas had secretly pined for Connor Knight, craving just one evening of incendiary passion with the elusive millionaire. So when Connor sought a few hours of solace in his virgin secretary's arms, she readily succumbed.

Then, a few weeks after their clandestine encounter, Holly received a surprising late Christmas gift: she was pregnant. Connor quickly offered to take care of her, but Holly knew her scandalous past would never allow her to accept his proposal…not even for the sake of their baby.


The Boss's Christmas Seduction is Kiwi author
Yvonne Lindsay's debut, an October release in North America, November in Australia/New Zealand, and available as an
eBook to readers all over the world. I invited Yvonne to be our guest this week at Sunburnt Author and she has happily obliged.

I love your twist on the traditional want-a-baby storyline. How did you come up with the idea?

Yvonne: The original idea for the story came through a writing exercise I did for a RWNZ meeting where we had to come up with a back page blurb with a Christmas theme. I was working on something else at the time so a fresh idea was fun to tackle and afterwards I let it simmer in the back of my mind. Through that 'simmer' period I kept weighing up the gulf between one who has had a privileged upbringing and one who hasn't and I kept asking myself how could Connor and Holly's situation possibly get worse? Brainstorming with two special writing friends was also a huge help when I needed a fresh perspective on any aspect of the story that I needed help with.

This story is crammed with emotion. Is that something you deliberately work to instil in your stories or is it just your natural writing style?

Yvonne: You know, it's funny, but I don't see my writing as crammed with emotion. Whenever I've finished a book and I start to read other writers I always feel my work is lacking, that I haven't gone deep enough. When I'm writing, my first draft is rather sparse on the emotional punch that I try to layer back through on subsequent read/write throughs. Sometimes I'll be near the end of a story, and be fully immersed in the character, and all of a sudden I'll know I need to go back to a point in the beginning to deepen their response to a situation. It's only as I come to really know the character that I can plumb their emotional depths. Sometimes it's alot more difficult to do that than others.

Do you like to read emotionally driven stories? Who are your favourite emotion-packed authors?

Yes, I do like to read emotionally charged stories. I think the authors who have most influenced me with their emotion-packed styles are Linda Howard and Suzanne Brockmann. There's something about their characters that continues to live with me long after I've put the book down. Of course there are numerous other authors, both ST and category, who strike a chord with me as a reader but those two would probably have had the biggest effect on me.

Readers are going to love the authenticity and the detail you put into your NZ setting...

Yvonne: I consider myself really lucky to live in a city like Auckland. We're spoiled for beaches and water sports here and our harbour is dotted with islands, some as conservation reserves, which are great to visit as day trips, and others as communities of their own. It was after a day out on the boat and doing a scenic trip around the back of one island that the idea of Connor having a privately owned island, just a ten minute flight from the CBD was born.

You also made the office setting very authentic. Have you worked as a PA in a corporate setting? Have you organised an office Christmas party? (and did Santa look like Connor? *g*)

Yvonne: Yes I have worked as a PA in a corporate setting but thankfully I never had to organise anything on the scale that Holly had to, I don't think I'd have managed with her flair for detail if Santa had looked like Connor! I've always admired people who can hold a gazillion strings and know when to tweak and when to let go of each one to bring something off like a large Christmas party all the while looking as though it was easy.

You obviously did loads of research--Andrea's illness and Connor's helicopter are 2 examples that spring readily to mind. Do you enjoy the research?

Hmmm, most research itself I find difficult, especially about something as emotive as Andrea's illness. The websites I visited while looking at heriditary illness, and the stories posted on so many of them, were very sobering and reminded me once again to be thankful every day for what I have in my life. The helicopter was easy. The man of the house is an avid air-anything-enthusiast so researching rich boys flying toys was easy. The hardest thing I find about research is knowing when to stop looking for more information. It's so easy to get wound up in the threads that one question leads to. You have to know when to pull the plug and when to use little enough of what you've learned so as not to be dumping information at the expense of your story. I don't know that I actually enjoy research all that much, it's a bit of a necessary evil in our industry.

Connor's story is the first of your New Zealand Knights trilogy. Tell us about the family and the brothers to come.

Yum, the Knight brothers are the three sons of an Italian immigrant father and an Irish immigrant mother. NZ is such a melting pot of nationalities so it was fun to explore the family dynamics. It hasn't been too unusual here in NZ for immigrant families to anglicise their names so the boys' grandparents changed the surname Cavaliere to Knight in an attempt to ease their transition to NZ life.

I cruelly took the boys' mother from them when they were young and impressionable--12, 10 and 8 years old--and gave the eldest the responsibility of caring for his younger brothers when their father turned to work and drink to assuage his loss. I originally plotted and wrote the stories in order of the brothers' ages, but the powers that be didn't buy them in that order.

Connor's story, the youngest brother, was originally my last story. He was the quiet brother, the sensible one, with the guarded heart. He still lives with the guilt that as an eight year old who'd had little to do with his ailing mother preferred to race out into the sunshine and the gardens to play rather than say goodbye. All he wants is to rebuild the sense of family that was lost when his mother passed away, and he'll do anything to protect it given half the chance.

The second story in the trilogy is Declan's. He's the caretaker, the one in charge. He feels responsible for everything and everyone. He carries the scars of responsibility that were borne by him after his mother died and his father went to pieces, and this responsibility he's brought into all other aspects of his life. Every day he battles with the fact that he could have saved his fiancee's life if he'd only been with her the day she fell during a rock climb. He's determined to stand alone and not to need anyone or anything more in his life than what he can provide himself.

Mason's is the third book in the New Zealand Knights trilogy. His was the most complex for me to write and I really had to dig deep into his loner psyche. I actually ended up writing his story three times before I got it right. He's a tough nut to crack. He's fiercely loyal and lives by his own code of ethics which finds most others wanting. He was driven to be a success and to take control of his life from the point at which he realised that life wasn't all about cracking the latest joke, but was all about making the right decisions and sticking by them.

And there was mention of cousins in The Boss's Christmas Seduction. Do you have plans for more Knights?

Oooh, now that you mention it Carmen does need her own story too, and she's bound to have sisters. Good point. I'll have to let that one gel for a bit. Right now I'm working on a stand alone story with a masterful Italian alpha hero and a discarded trophy wife. They're both very challenging people to work with!

Thanks for sharing some behind-the-scenes insights with us, Yvonne, and for agreeing to be our guest this week at Sunburnt Author. Readers, visitors, fans of category romance: if you have any further questions for Yvonne about this book or her upcoming projects or about her fabulous part of the world, ask away in the comments. Yvonne will be popping in during the week to read and respond. Have fun!