Spotlight & Giveaway: Beauty and Her One-Night Baby by Dani Collins

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Dani Collins to HJ!

Hi Dani and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, Beauty and Her One-Night Baby!

 
Hi Harlequin Junkies! I’m so excited to visit you again!
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

Scarlett accidentally got herself pregnant by her boss’s estranged son, Javiero, and her boss pressed her to keep it a secret. When her boss dies, she’s about to confront Javiero at the reading of the will. Her water breaks and that’s when Javiero discovers he’s the baby’s father.
Javiero is furious she kept the baby from him, but accompanies her for the birth. He insists on being a hands-on father, but Scarlett has reasons for not wanting to marry him.
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

Javiero has a feud with his half-brother. Early in the story they confront one another. Javiero is wearing an eye patch and has livid scars from a recent jaguar attack. (He’s a beast.) Here’s how he taunts Val:

“No comment?” Javiero taunted into the thick silence, suddenly thrilled to look like a street thug who’d lost a knife fight. “Not going to say you like what I’ve done with my hair or something equally banal?”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• It’s a Beauty and the Beast take-off! (obviously)
• I visited Spain/Madrid prior to writing this book. I also visited Bruges, Belgium. My daughter said she thought Bruges would have been a better setting for a *beast* and I’m kicking myself that I didn’t set at least part of the book there.
• In the fairy tale, Belle’s father usually gets called mad and he’s locked up. I did put Scarlett’s father in prison, but I decided Scarlett would struggle with postpartum depression. I feel like it’s something we don’t talk about enough, considering how common it is.

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

In the course of her job as PA for Javiero’s father, Scarlett visits Javiero. They had a sexual attraction they both ignored until what she thought might be their last meeting. She gave into the sexual pull and–Ooops! Baby on the way.

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

One of the hardest part in writing a book with a newborn is maintaining sexual tension while the heroine waits out her six weeks of recovery from childbirth. Here they get hot and heavy when Javiero traps her against the wall with a kiss.

He dragged his head up. They panted, breaths mingling.
“My towel is falling off.”
“I know.” She could feel the shape of him against the gusset of her knickers, so hard and hot the silk should have singed away. She wanted him so badly she could have wept.
The belt on her robe had loosened. Her soft belly was pressed to his firm one. Her breasts were exposed.
“We can’t,” he growled in a voice that rang with agony. “I know we can’t. But I want to.” He gave a thrust of his hips to punctuate his need.
He hit such a magic spot that she let out a strangled groan of pleasure.
“Oh,” he said in a tone of pleased discovery. “You like that.” He did it again.
Her whole body shimmered with pleasure.
“More?”
“Yes,” she sobbed. Her fingernails clawed into his shoulder.

Readers should read this book….

If you like a heroine with a spine of steel who is also very vulnerable and a hero who is steely and rugged yet has a fiercely protective and tender side.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

I hope you saw last month’s book which is the first in this duet, A Hidden Heir to Redeem Him. They stand alone, but are about the two half-brothers, Javeiro and Val.

I have two books this fall–
Confessions of an Italian Marriage opens with the heroine convinced her husband has faked his own death so she flushes him out by pretending the marry again. (it works!)
Innocent in the Sheikh’s Palace is another fairy tale take-off, this one inspired by Ugly Duckling.

I’ve just started a trilogy with Clare Connelly and Tara Pammi that is promising to be a ton of fun. I can’t wait to share more of it with you!
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: A signed print copy of both books in the Feuding Billionaire Brothers duet (A Hidden Heir to Redeem Him and Beauty and Her One-Night Baby) anywhere in the world.

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: Do you enjoy a fairy-tale inspired romance? What are some of your favourite retellings? Any that surprised you?

 
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Excerpt from Beauty and Her One-Night Baby:

Here Javiero arrives to attend the reading of his father’s will and is waylaid after his mother discovers Scarlett in the ladies’ room.

With a snarl of impatience, he strode past his mother and shoved into the women’s toilet, halting abruptly at the sight of Scarlett turning from the sink.
Distantly he heard the door drift closed behind him while he took in her appearance. Her blond hair was gathered at her nape, her face was rounder, her blouse untucked and her tailored jacket open to allow for—
He cocked his head, widening his one eye, not sure he was seeing this correctly.
He yanked his gaze back to her face. Her expression was frozen in horror as she took in his shaggy hair and eye patch and gashed face poorly hidden by an untrimmed beard.
The word ‘pregnant’ landed in a pool of comprehension deep in his brain, sending a tidal wave of shock through his entire psyche.
*
Scarlett dropped her phone with a clatter.
She had been trying to call Kiara. Now she was taking in the livid claw marks across Javiero’s face, each pocked on either side with the pinpricks of recently removed stitches. His dark brown hair was longer than she’d ever seen it, perhaps gelled back from the widow’s peak at some point this morning, but it was mussed and held a jagged part. He wore a black eye patch like a pirate, its narrow band cutting a thin stripe across his temple and into his hair.
Maybe that’s why his features looked as though they had been set askew? His mouth was…not right. His upper lip was uneven and the claw marks drew lines through his unkempt stubble all the way down into his neck.
That was dangerously close to his jugular! Dear God, he had nearly been killed.
She grasped at the edge of the sink, trying to stay on her feet while she grew so light-headed at the thought of him dying that she feared she would faint.
The ravages of his attack weren’t what made him look so forbidding and grim, though, she computed through her haze of panic and anguish. No. The contemptuous glare in his one eye was for her. For this.
He flicked another outraged glance at her middle.
“I thought we were meeting in the boardroom.” His voice sounded gravelly. Damaged as well? Or was that simply his true feelings toward her now? Deadly and completely devoid of any of the sensual admiration she’d sometimes heard in his tone.
Not that he’d ever been particularly warm toward her. He’d been aloof, indifferent, irritated, impatient, explosively passionate. Generous in the giving of pleasure. Of compliments. Then cold as she left. Disapproving. Malevolent.
Damningly silent.
And now he was…what? Ignoring that she was as big as a barn?
Her arteries were on fire with straight adrenaline, her heart pounding and her brain spinning with the way she was having to switch gears so fast. Her eyes were hot and her throat tight. Everything in her wanted to scream Help me, but she’d been in enough tight spots to know this was all on her. Everything was always on her. She fought to keep her head and get through the next few minutes before she moved on to the next challenge.
Which was just a tiny trial called childbirth, but she would worry about that when she got to the hospital.
As the tingle of a fresh contraction began to pang in her lower back, she tightened her grip on the edge of the sink and gritted her teeth, trying to ignore the coming pain and hang on to what dregs of dignity she had left.
“I’m in labor,” she said tightly. “It’s yours.”
Fresh shock flickered over his scarred face, and his gaze dropped to her middle again. “I’m supposed to believe that?”
“My water broke. It’s a textbook sign.”
“You know what I mean.” His aggressive stance didn’t soften, but a tiny shadow flickered in his eye as he watched her draw in a long breath.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

From irresistible beast in the bedroom…

to father of her child!

The first time Javiero Rodriguez sees CEO Scarlett Walker after their impassioned night together, she’s in labor with his baby! No matter how shocking the surprise, Javiero won’t let his son grow up in a broken home like he did.

Scarlett has worked hard for independence and she can’t accept empty vows. Yet the scars Javiero gained in a jaguar attack haven’t lessened the tycoon’s rugged appeal. Which means every day is a heated reminder of the pleasure they shared…and could share again!
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Meet the Author:

Award-winning and USA Today Bestselling author Dani Collins thrives on giving readers emotional, compelling, heart-soaring romance with some laughter and heat thrown in, just like real life. Mostly she writes contemporary romance for Harlequin Presents and Tule’s Montana Born, but her backlist of nearly sixty books also includes self-published erotic romance, romantic comedy, and even an epic medieval fantasy. When she’s not writing—just kidding, she’s always writing.
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