Claire Hadleigh

  Sometimes a writer just has to do some silly stuff.  Why?  Because as we create our stories the imp within demands some quality time, and because you want to pepper your story with believable facts that help embellish an historical romance with a degree of veracity.   Several of my historical romances have these little streaks of humor and/or facts, so in Wicked Wagers I included a few odd but fun touches:  first, the Irish Water Spaniel.  In reading through one of the many issues of Country Living (the UK edition) I tend to hoard, I came across an article about this somewhat rare breed.  But, I must confess, it was the image of these wild and wooly hounds that made me want to incorporate them into the romance. Pretty cute, uh?  These dogs are excellent retrievers for waterfowl, which was perfect for the area that WW is set -- on the west coast in the Whitehaven area, not far from the Lake District.  How can you resist a dog that looks like this, I ask you?  And when I did some re

This blog entry was suggested by one of my colleagues, Jo-Ann Roberts , who urged me to post something about the hero in Wicked Wagers , the second romance in The School for Sophistication series, which is due to go live on October 15.  After all, she wrote, "Readers want to know what the hero looks like!"  Okay, Jo-Ann -- this one's for you! Here is how I imagine Benjamin Malory Burton to look -- he's tall, rugged, has honey-gold hair, deep blue eyes and a set of lips that makes my heroine, Julia Montford, swoon time and time again.  Some of you may recognize the actor, James Norton, best known for his starring role in the British TV mystery series, Grantchester .  As I scoured the images on Google and Pinterest, I kept returning to Norton.  I've never watched the series (my bad!), but there was something about Norton that rang true for a former British Cavalry officer from the Napoleonic Wars.   And when I stumbled on this image, I was convinced I'd found B