Once in a blue moon, a story begins with a fully-formed scene that lands in my head out of nowhere. BE MINE is one of those. Click the image below for product link!
Cover image by Terrell Woods @terrellcwoods unsplash.com
Three key things about BE MINE:
It’s a co-workers to lovers hurt/comfort romance featuring a pair of private-school teachers;
It begins at a traumatic turning point (content alert: this story deals with the consequences of sexual assault);
Its focus is the work two men do when they go, almost overnight, from dating (and not talking about what might come next) to living together (and talking about everything).
Valentine Gale, Ph.D., is a socially-awkward language-arts teacher. Christopher (Kit) Gale, M.S., is a charming surfer who teaches science. On the surface, they don’t have a lot in common beyond their workplace.
But true romance is about discovering what connects you to a specific person. It’s sometimes about figuring out what you might need to change about yourself, so you can make that connection work.
And by that I mean: nobody’s perfect. Sometimes we speak or behave in ways that do us no favors, and/or are actively hurtful to other people. Sometimes we decide to fix that.
I began writing BE MINE in September 2020, finished the first draft a year later, and did considerable polishing before launching. This book is a bit of a departure for me; it deals with a crime committed against one of my main characters. That crime occurs off the page, but it’s discussed from multiple points of view over the course of the book.
I tried to find ways to have people other than Kit discussing the crime, the perpetrator, the investigation. The role of a victim can be uncomfortably passive, unless you’re writing a revenge/vigilante scenario. This is not that.
Kit wants the whole thing to go away. He talks about it with Val, with his therapist, with the cops etc., but he really wants to get to the end of talking about it as soon as possible.
Along the way, both men are honest with each other in ways they weren’t before.
Like all my books, BE MINE touches the stories of other characters in my universe. Trauma therapist Dr. Robyn LaSalle appears again (she’s present in MAKE ME and NEVER ENOUGH, among others); Mark Valance & Liam Byrne of GIVING IT UP are Valentine’s neighbors.
And like all my books, this one has a happy ending.