Reckless Night

What do you give your beautiful wife when you’ve got all the money in the world but can’t spend it?

Victor “Drake” Drakovitch used to run a criminal empire, but he gave it all up for the woman he loves. Grace, an accomplished artist, abandoned the life she knew in order to be with the one man she could never live without.

Exiled to an island far from their former lives, the two stay safe from the watchful eyes of Drake’s many enemies. This Christmas, Drake wants to show Grace how much her sacrifice means. But what can he give a woman who shuns gold jewelry and diamonds, furs and expensive cars? Grace doesn’t want fancy things; she wants what Drake can give her—unquestioning devotion, fierce protection… and the best sex a woman has ever had.

Until terror strikes and Grace realizes that the best gift of all is a dangerous husband.

Lisa Marie Rice is eternally 30 years old and will never age. She is tall and willowy and beautiful. Men drop at her feet like ripe pears. She has won every major book prize in the world. She is a black belt with advanced degrees in archaeology, nuclear physics, and Tibetan literature. She is a concert pianist. Did I mention her Nobel Prize? Of course, Lisa Marie Rice is a virtual woman and exists only at the keyboard when writing erotic romance. She disappears when the monitor winks off.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Now isn’t that an interesting bio to have? Isn’t that a thousand times better than saying that I’m a middle-aged, er…woman, no longer in the very, very first flush of youth, who basically sits in front of a computer screen all day in her pajamas?

I am so lucky to be Lisa Marie Rice! There is no literary genre anywhere remotely as exciting and thrilling as erotic romantic suspense. It has absolutely everything: red-hot passion, danger, adventure, heart-stopping love. I cannot begin to tell you how much I enjoy sitting down to the keyboard and bleeding…er, writing my heart out, falling in love with my men over and over and over again.

Well, why not? My men are brave and smart and built. And boy do they love their women! Their women are much more interesting than new weaponry, sports cars, and even plasma TVs in their eyes, and the fascination will last their entire lifetimes, I promise. It’s sex, of course, but also a whole lot more. My heroes genuinely like and admire their women, though in the beginning this is sometimes obscured by blinding lust. Once that first sharp edge of desire is over and they settle down a little—and that will take several years and a kid or two—they’re so bonded with their women that they couldn’t live without them.

And it is so much fun "being" my heroines while writing about them. You may have noticed that most, if not all, of my heroines are artsy in some way, just like me. It just sort of comes out that way. There’s not much calculation when creating my characters: They literally become alive for me and when my character says—I’m a singer or a designer or I love books—well, that’s that.

It’s fabulous sitting here in my not-perfect body and becoming the beautiful young woman that that ornery alpha male is glomming on to. Of course, my heroines are also in dire peril, which is not so much fun. And which is why I’m the writer and not the heroine (give or take a few years and a few pounds).

One true fact: Looking out of my study across my wonderful terrace I see a bright blue line which is the Ionian Sea. And if I had a powerful enough telescope I could see the Greek temple where Pythagoras taught.