Spotlight & Giveaway: Redeemed by her Innocence by Bella Frances

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Bella Frances to HJ!

Hi Bella and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, Redeemed by her Innocence!

 
Hello Romancelandia.
 

To start off, can you please tell us a little bit about this book?:

Wedding dresses – the most romantic garment a woman will ever wear – right? But what if you were fated to design them, and never get to wear them. How would it feel to slip on a smile every day when inside your heart is breaking? That was the idea that I wanted to explore in this story, with a kindhearted, hometown girl and the brooding, broken man who comes to save her – eventually.

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

He looked into her eyes with such pain, and love. Just a moment, but it stretched there like a path to eternity and she knew she would go to the ends of the earth for this man.

I’m a sucker for pain (!) and love and the ends of the earth. Well you would go there for your man – wouldn’t you? !

What inspired this book?

Judith Krantz and DH Lawrence! Krantz’s books always inspire me, and in Scruples, she describes the shockingly erotic encounter between newly widowed heroine Billy and her late husband’s chauffeur. The trope is so Lady Chatterly’s lover and of course, Presents heroes are never that, so I had a lot of fun weaving it into hero, Nikos’ backstory instead.

How did you ‘get to know’ your main characters? Did they ever surprise you?

It’s hard to know what came first – the electrifying image of naked torso, tattooed Nikos or the character-inspiration that had been brewing since I’d first read Scruples. Nikos just had to be a young gigolo, tough and street and more than capable of taking a cent and turning it into a fortune. I became intrigued by the Sydney biker gangs and felt that his backstory was rooted there.
Jacquelyn was inspired by Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief. She embodied the cool, calm exterior I knew Jacquelyn had, and so I watched that film (sometimes research is great fun!) to understand her behaviours and mannerisms.

What was your favorite scene to write?

I absolutely love scenes in which the heroine surprises everyone (particularly the hero!) by cutting her own path in life, proving that she is not only beautiful, but intelligent and tenacious too. So when Jacquelyn goes to New York and finally gets the break she deserves, it makes Nikos sit up and see her in a new light. And ignites jealousy in him he didn’t expect to feel. That’s when he finally knows that he has to have her, for good.

What was the most difficult scene to write?

With such a tortured backstory, I knew I had to have Nikos confront his demons, with Jacquelyn present to show him the path to salvation. So that meant bringing his no-good father all the way into the story, and into the the presence of good hearted, Guardian Angel Jacquelyn. It’s when his father insults her that Nikos finally breaks.
Emotional scenes are hard to write because they are so emotional! But worth it – I hope you’ll agree.

Would you say this book showcases your writing style or is it a departure for you?

This is me! I write gutsy, emotional, light and dark, sensual stories. The backstories are so important to me – the characters can’t be characters without all that life behind them. How would they ever know true love if they hadn’t known all the pitfalls first?

What do you want people to take away from reading this book?

That they should never give up hope! True love will come if you keep looking. And if you keep trusting. And that the we all get our just desserts – especially the bad guys. (Is it desserts, as in chocolate pudding, or deserts, as in what you deserve?? Does anyone know?)

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have planned?

Right now I am eyelash deep in my current work in progress for Presents. It’s a Secret Baby and the parents are completely incompatible (of course!). He is a titled, aristocrat with immense wealth and no heir. She is a single mum with a job, an invalid mother and unemployment looming. But what he proposes is the last thing she wants…Set between Greece and the lush lands of

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: I have 5 signed copies and bookmarks to give away to readers internationally.

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: I loved researching all the wedding dresses that Jacquelyn designs. That meant visiting an amazing designer (Joyce Young) and going backstage at a Wedding show. So what was your wedding dress like? Lace, silk, sleek, puffy, veil, no veil (they’re all beautiful of course!)?

 
a Rafflecopter giveaway

 
 

Excerpt from Redeemed by her Innocence:

Behind her the bed she should have slept in, smooth and intact, a monument to her guilt. She checked her watch. Eight-fifteen. Any minute now she was going to get up from this stool and slip into yesterday’s crushed sundress. She was going to walk through this sprawling villa, not thinking all her excited, girlish thoughts, and become the stony-faced businesswoman she had to be.
She wasn’t going to use facts and figures and numbers and charts. That wasn’t her best language and right now she didn’t have the head for it at all. She was going to speak from the heart. She would tell him the real story of Ariana Bridal and how her grandmother had built it from nothing, sewing her own dreams with the dreams of the women whose wedding gowns she’d stitched. She was going to tell him of the tiny shop and how it smelled of flowers and how, as a child, she’d longed to touch the white and creamy silks, and had loved to see the faces of the women who’d tried on dresses, expectant, puzzled and then finally the beaming smiles as each of them had looked like the bride they would be.
She wasn’t going to tell him that she had wished with all her heart that she would be one of those brides one day, dressed in white, making her nonna proud.
No, what she would tell him was that the tiny shop had become two then three, then more, each of them uniquely, expertly caring for each bride. How could that tiny empire wither and die when it had so much of what women really wanted? That personal touch…women who understood other women?
That little shop held her dreams safe inside, like an egg in a nest: her dreams, her mother’s health, her father’s income—everything she held dear was caught up in Ariana Bridal.
How clearly she could still see her grandmother’s tiny hands, one buried in silk, the other busily hand-stitching pearls.
A tear formed in her eye. She tipped her head back, desperately holding it in place. She would not cry again. Please not now…
She stood up tall, she breathed, and just as she heard the footsteps of the maid she smiled a tiny smile and turned, ready.
On they walked to the boardroom. With every step along the hallway, her heels echoed in the marbled void but her thundering, anxious heartbeat all but smothered her sense of hearing.
She saw a door ahead, and she knew this was it. The maid paused, Jacquelyn rounded the corner of the room and he looked up at her, their eyes meeting in a flash of recognition and acknowledgement. And—damn it to hell—shame.
He waited until the maid closed the door behind them.
“Good morning, Jacquelyn. I hope you found everything you needed this morning.’
‘Yes, thanks,’ she repeated, automatically.
‘Great, well, let’s do this. I’m sure you are as desperate to get back to England as I am to get across the Atlantic. I’ve got meetings set up for the rest of the day so, shall we?’
Complete denial that they had spent the night making love? She had expected a businesslike approach but this was callous even beyond that.
‘I’ve had your laptop hooked up over there.’
He bowed his head to his own machine, cast a hand to the end of the long shiny table where a screen blinked down from the wall.
She looked back to see his dark head bent, his brow furrowed, his hands flying over the keyboard, sending emails as she stood there. He didn’t even have the grace to pay her any attention.
‘I’m not going to use technology,’ she said.
He looked up, his brow furrowed even more. Standing there, she felt like a schoolgirl with unfinished homework.
‘You’re not? I thought you were working on something yesterday.’
‘That was yesterday,’ she said. She heard the wobble in her voice but it wasn’t grief. It was anger. Pure, cold anger.
‘Look, before you begin… Jacquelyn,’ he said, pushing back from the desk and sitting up straight in his chair. ‘What happened last night was just sex. It has nothing to do with this. I hope I made it clear that the two things are totally unconnected.’
She hadn’t expected him to be so cold, so brutal. It was as if he were putting oceans of distance between them before she had even begun. He wasn’t even giving her a chance. Dragging her here and then all that they had done, and now he was rejecting not only her body but her business too…?
‘You said it didn’t count,’ she heard her voice say. ‘You didn’t say it would disadvantage me.’
‘I didn’t exactly say that.’
“Fair enough,’ he conceded, after a long pause. A pause in which she felt as if her whole world were contaminated. But damn him, damn his dark mood and his thin-lipped smile, damn his broad shoulders and washboard-flat abs. Damn his hands that had held her and caressed her and his whole wretched body that had pounded into hers, pounding as her heart was now pounding in her own ears.
‘Fair enough,’ he said again, but it was without enthusiasm. It was a concession to her boldness, a momentary victory.
‘So, can you at least tell me if I’m wasting my time?’ she asked. ‘I’d rather know now. I don’t really want to be here any more than you do. I am very well aware that you’ve filed what happened last night under “No Further Action”.’
He smiled now, to himself, clearly amused at her imagining that anything else was ever likely to have happened.
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Deny it.’
Her voice was shrill with anger. She couldn’t quite believe what was happening, but it seemed to be out of her hands now. Words were pouring out of her mouth.
“Who are you angry with, Jacquelyn? Me, for making the first move, or yourself for thinking I’d fall into line.’
‘I’m not angry with myself. I’m not the one with double standards.’
‘Maybe not. But you wouldn’t be the first woman to think that sleeping with me would get you preferential treatment. It’s the oldest trick in the book.”
“How dare you?’ she said, white rage now slipping over her. ‘You have no idea who I am or what I stand for. But it’s quite obvious what goes on inside your head.’
She turned around, as if she could grab her coat and make for the nearest exit and hail a black cab on the street, but all she saw was a blinking blank screen and his reflection outlined in it. She kept her face turned there, feeling the tears welling up and her chin wobbling and that dreadful thickening warning of grief in her throat.
Months she had been like this. Months recovering from that rat Tim, and now here she was back again. A gibbering, soft-hearted idiot who couldn’t even stand up for herself.
Every single fibre in her body thrummed with fury at herself. She would not turn round and show him. Not one single sign of weakness. Not one.
But the energy in the room shifted and she watched as, like a typhoon cloud crossing the plain, the image in the screen moved and in seconds he was standing there behind her.
She looked down at her fingers curled white around the back of the chair. She concentrated all her strength into that single spot, tried to repel him with the sheer force of her will, just as she had opened herself up to him last night—welcomed his kisses, his touch, his body. Welcomed them and lost herself in them.
How on earth could she have been so completely naive?
‘Look,’ he said, his voice low and calm. ‘I’m sorry. That came out all wrong. I just don’t want you to get your hopes up. I’ve had a look through your website and it’s not going to work for House. That’s it. I don’t mind giving you a hand, you know. A mentoring partner or something like that. I can advise on various things that you might find useful. But…’
‘My family poured everything into this business. My grandmother’s fingers were curled with arthritis by the age of fifty but she stitched and made beautiful clothes for the women of our town, and she would be ashamed to see me standing here like this.’

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

Can the untouched beauty tame the beast?
Ruthless NIkos wont risk his company to save Jacquelyn’s struggling bridal boutique. But he will give her the best night of her life! Could untouched Jacquelyn’s sensual surrender be this dark hearted Greek’s redemption?

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Meet the Author:

Bella Frances grew up steeped in Celtic myths and fairy tales and now has the fabulously fun job of creating her own fairy tales for modern women. All fairy tales have heroes and heroines, good guys and bad guys, but Bella’s books have to have that extra sizzle. Passion and sensuality are her two top ingredients.
Bella writes for the world’s best romance publisher, Harlequin/Mills and Boon.
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