My Novels

Just like the movies, television shows and books I feature in this blog, I’m drawn to writing romance across genres. My first few novels were fantasy, and since deciding to shelve those for awhile, I’ve written two young adult novels: a historical fantasy (Veiled Iron), and a contemporary (Broadway High).

Veiled Iron is a silk- and spice-flavored tale about an athletic girl who defies the stark gender rules of her world to play the game she loves.

Academy siegeball is fifteen-year-old Layla’s life. She’s the only girl who’s ever dared to play, but in two years’ time an arranged marriage will end her siegeball days for good. She already has to wear a veil; the last thing she needs is a new teammate who doesn’t believe girls belong on the field.

Seventeen-year-old Sanjar comes from a country where men protect women; they don’t tackle them in a game that’s a substitute for war. If he refuses to throw to her, she won’t get hurt, but nothing in his street-rat past has prepared him for a girl like Layla. She takes hits like a boy and dances like a siren—and he keeps wishing he could see the girl behind the veil.

As Layla erodes his resolve, unfamiliar feelings simmer through her. Sanjar isn’t judgmental like the girls, or callous like the other boys, but when Sanjar’s former prince demands his return, their Sultan decrees a spoils game between Layla’s academy and Sanjar’s old one—with Sanjar as the unwilling prize. Suddenly, Layla realizes there’s something worse than a boy who can’t help seeing the girl in athlete’s clothing: never seeing him again.

To read the first chapter, click here.

Broadway High is about a fiercely private girl who has to stage a very public romance opposite the one boy she’s always hated.

For Natalie Whitmore, earning the lead in her high school’s musical is an epic disaster. The audition was supposed to help golden boy senior Aidan Spence notice her—not get her cast in a kissing role with Tom Dempsey, the gorgeous serial dater who broke her best friend’s heart. Liking Tom is a cliché Natalie refuses to support, so she devotes herself to catching Aidan and putting on an acting performance the small town of Broadway, Virginia will never forget.

But with their rural community up in arms over the risqué musical, Aidan’s ego boiling over and her family cracking around her, at least Natalie can trust Tom to stay his easy-going, flirtatious, shallow self. Except when did he get so moody? Why doesn’t he have a new girlfriend? And how did he become the one person she could lean on when everything else fails?

To read the first two chapters, click here.

As for what might be coming, I have ideas in the works for a Regency series about four German nobleman living in London and serving as bodyguards for the Grand Duchess Francesca Sophia Helena Therese — or “Sophy” as she prefers to be called.

I also have plans for more YA novels in the Veiled Iron world, as well as some contemporary YA novels that may or may not be set in the same town as Broadway High. One involves a war between the band and choir. The other features four guys on the academic quiz team–the “Smart Boy Posse.”