About

"Bad Boys with Heart" behind-the-scenes

The Birth of the "Bad Boys"

Let's be honest--I never understood the appeal of the billionaire love stories because I always loved reading and writing about the underdogs, so when a few of my author friends approached me about doing a series about billionaires, I was like, "Oooh, ahhh, hmmm, uhhhh... let me think about it."

The opportunity to work with these gals again was seriously tempting because they're awesome, but billionaires? Billionaires? What's so interesting about a guy who can have everything he wants? Well, at least even if he thinks he can--how arrogant... unless he can't... unless he's so beset by troubles and a tragic background that runs deeper than what money can solve. But what kind of person would he be? What would be his character? Could I respect someone who might potentially be so full of himself because he's so successful? Lol. That's when I also realized that I was a reverse snob ;-)

I talked out my dilemma with my sister when we went walking early the next morning, and she laughed at me: "Ha! What do you mean you don't like billionaire stories, you're totally into Darcy, aren't you? Darcy is just the equivalent of a billionaire in Jane Austen's time and you ate up all those historical romances back in the day!" She was right, I did--my mom had a box of Barbara Cartland's under the bed that I discovered as a fourth grader and my brain was ruined with "happily ever afters" ever since.

But now I was renewed with excitement to write these because in a way I was modernizing every trope that I loved from that era--the governess rescued in the library from the hero's villainess friend (um, yeah, easily done); the poor relation staying at her icky snobby family's house and catching the eye of the local hero (or in this case, she works at the rundown hotel); the sweet innocent getting stranded with the bad boy in a cottage during a rainstorm (and thus being compromised and forced to marry). Lol. Lol--well, I could certainly have some forced proximity with my ghost tour guide and my bad-boy billionaire because of the threat of a couple of rogue bodyguards. My imagination ran wild.

Yes, I could play in this world. I accepted my friends' invitation and we all flew to Eureka Springs, AK to get further connected to this setting we were inventing--a "Bachelor's Cove" built just outside of Eureka Springs that would be just rife with billionaires... who just happened to be romantically unnattached ;-) There we took a ghost tour where we heard all the local lore of the area from its creation to its present day, and I fell in love with the hotel downtown--we took about a million pictures (because I'm paparazzi that way) and were even allowed in some of the rooms. We also found an adorable family clinic and took a trolley through the town to view all of the AMAZING architecture from the era, plus the mansion. Who can forget the mansion!! It had transformed from an estate to a school to an insane asylum to a hospital to a hotel.

And so I hope as you read my books that you'll be able to live some of the same magic of this area and also get lost in my modernized historical romance tropes, haha, or at the very least get to know the workings of my chaotic brain. I threw in all my favorite things--gushy romance, murder mysteries, ghost tours, and... and... okay, cute (though tragically-broken-and-in-need-of-a-hug) guys!      

And that's the whole story! Thanks for connecting!

--Stephanie Fowers