Jessica Hart

Defiant Love

Release Date: 1993

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CF134IW
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00CF134IW

Gussie cares passionately about the Northumberland countryside and clashes with developer Hunter Scott over his construction plans. When Hunter offers her a job as an environmental consultant on the project, Gussie is thrown. Can she make a difference working on the inside of the development? What will it be like working side by side with Hunter? And can her principles stand up to an even more powerful emotion - her growing feelings for Hunter?

A Little Bit Extra...

I’m not a patient person. I like to make a plan and put it into action straight away. The first step in my plan to fund a PhD by writing romance was to get a book accepted, and that took rather longer than I had expected. So once I got there, I was eager to move on to step two, which was to sell my flat in London. The theory was that I would have enough to live on while I wrote full time and got a few more books under my belt, and when the chance to stay in a castle near Alnwick for free in exchange for dog and cat sitting came up, I jumped at it.

Well, it wasn’t quite as exciting as it sounds. The castle was mostly a 19th century renovation and had been divided into a number apartments (although there was a stuffed bear still in the original 15th-century hall), while the dog, a rescue Dobermann cross, was completely out of control. But I loved Northumberland, and I wrote Defiant Love while I was there, surrounded by beautiful countryside. Ecological campaigner vs. developer was a bit of a cliché even then, but I always liked Gussie with her weakness for expensive chocolates, and given how the environmental movement has grown since then, she was a woman ahead of her time, too.

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Cover design by and copyright Debbie Lishman 2013
Image of couple copyright Yuri Arcurs 2013, used under licence from Shutterstock.com