Spanish Billionaire, Innocent Wife - Behind the book

I don't often write a 'Behind the Book' post. Maybre that's because there isn't often a behind the book to tell. I don't spend a long process of collaging or collecting things in boxes or looking up heroes and heroines on the internet. OK, sometimes I do the researching heroes thing because that's fun - er - deep and meaningful research.

Often a book comes from just one line, or,as with the current story, just a picture of a place that I just must write about.

But sometimes there is a personal element to a book. A piece of the story that relates to something in my own life, something close to my heart that I've woven into it. And it does seem that when this happens, it creates a book that resonates with readers particularly strongly.

This has happened with Spanish Billionaire, Innocent Wife, where reviewers and readers have written to me about the theme of the tragedy that pulls Alannah and Raul back together when they have been separated for two years.

As Romance Reviews Today put it:

SPANISH BILLIONAIRE, INNOCENT WIFE pulls the reader first into the pain of the unexpected loss of a family member and the need to heal, then the second chance at love.

I know that feeling only too well. It's taken over ten years before I felt ready to write about it.

In 1995, my beautiful sister-in-law set out to drive to her job at a local school. She never arrived . Partway through the short journey, her car hit a van head-on. She died as a result of the head injuries she received, leaving behind a husband and two children, a daughter and a son aged just twelve and eight.

I was thinking about Julie today while I was in the garden. Past readers of this blog will know that the Magnet and I planted a special rose bush in the garden to commemorate her. A glorious deep burnt orange rose that has the name Remember Me.

Ever since we bought it, this rose has had its own particular approach to flowering. And every year I've told myself that this won't happen again -it's just coincidence, or I'm imagining things . . . .

'Remember Me' never flowers until it's Julie's birthday at the start of July. It has a rush of blooms again in September, the month in which she married. And it always has one last flower hanging on at the beginning of Novemeber, on the anniversary of the day she died.

So there I was in the garden, taking the dead flowers off all the other roses. All the roses that have had the same amount of care and attention, the same amount of fertiliser and rain and sunshine because they're all is a bed in the same part of the garden. And I realised that we're in the second half of June, heading towards Julie's birthday again. And I was 'dead-heading' all the other roses . . . but not Julie's 'Remember Me'.

All the other roses, look like the one above, with a profusion of flowers, lots of half open buds, and plenty more blooms on their way.

Julie's rose, looks like this . . . .

With the buds tightly closed, no hint of colour showing through. It is unlike every other rose bush in the garden. Every single one of them is in full flower - not 'Remember Me'. It looks just as if it's waiting - for the beginning of July.

If you want to know what it should look like - what it will look like - then I posted a photo of it here a couple of years ago. That picture was taken on Julie's birthday.

Every year I tell myself that I've imagined this. That it won't happen again - and every year it proves me wrong. And after over 12 years, that's so much more than a coincidence.

This year it has an extra special meaning for me as the book I wrote with so many memories of Julie, the book that's filled with the sorrow of her loss is on the shelves.