Of all the cities in the world, he chose Paris to propose!
Ronan O'Keefe has everything money can buy. He'd give it all up in an instant to keep the one thing he's losing. The jet-setting playboy is slowly being robbed of his sight.
Alone in New York, Kerry Doyle isn't feeling quite so brave about her trip around the world. Luckily, a millionaire has come to her rescue...
By the time they get to Paris, Ronan doesn't want to let beautiful, bubbly Kerry go. His secret is casting its shadow, but Kerry has lit up his life...
~ o O o ~
The Millionaire's Proposal, is a story that would never have
existed if it hadn't been for a phone call with my lovely editor Jenny Hutton - she who drags, sometimes kicking and screaming mind you, the best possible work out of me, even when I think I can't do it... Now we have lots of these I should point out and in fairness a great many of them are just as peppered 
with discussions of hot men and lots of laughing as they are with actual story/book plans - but on this one occasion she invited me to *think outside the box*. At this stage I may have used the phrase *you might wanna be careful what you wish for with me*... and she's met me so she knew what I meant by that...But without that impetus I doubt I would ever have tackled a story that would stretch me quite like this one did. *Outside the box* apparently translated in my head as *let's see how much work we can make for ourselves shall we?*
So let's just take our characters out of Ireland for a change - not enough? Okay - let's take them round the world - in 50-55k - AND fit in a plot at the same time. Let's have most of the destinations be somewhere I've never been - check. Oh and let's throw in an absolute doozy of a conflict for the hero shall we? And have the heroine not catch on until the end of the book. Oh and try to make sure there are hints sprinkled liberally all the way through it for her so when she DOES put it all together she
feels like a complete idiot on top of everything else...Oh and let's not forget to let our fast paced, full of one-liners and completely and utterly contemporary Modern Heat voice loose on the Romance line just to see what happens. Yuh-huh this book is literally cover to cover chock-a-block full of writers angst. But you know what? It's a book I'm soooo proud of! And I made myself bawl - not cry or weep or shed a tear - but bawl at the end. That's how real these people and their emotions were to me.
I put my heart and soul into this book and I can only hope it shows.
*Outside the box* is a scary place to be - but lemme tell ya; it's one heck of a rollercoaster ride! And I quite like it out here...
Locations in this book:
Everybody got their passports ready?Then allow me to take you on a round-the-world-trip... New York, San Francisco, Fiji, Australia, Hong Kong, Dubai, Paris and then back home to dear old Ireland for a bit of a wedding...
And there's a small mention of the Canadian Rockies and Hawaii along the way. Sigh. Cannot begin to tell you how much I wanted to be ON this trip.
The initial idea for this of course came from my adventures in the summer of 2007 when little-miss-live-in-the-writing-cave set forth on her first ever trip to the USA. First stop New York -
where I fell completely and utterly in love with the city. And because writers never ever stop plotting stories in their heads there was of course plenty to get my imagination working! Hence this story starts with Kerry meeting Ronan on the plane to New York. A little daydreaming on the plane on the way over perchance Trish? Possibly...Then there's the scene in Battery Park at the bottom end of the island of Manhattan where Ronan dances Kerry through the movement sensitive fountains. I sat in that park in front of those fountains in flipping 97 degree odd heat and thought seriously about dancing in them. Doesn't take much for you to get where that idea might have come from then... Did you dance in the fountains Trish? Erm - no - I'd have been about three feet taller than everyone who was. But man it looked like fun!
So all the New York stuff is from personal experience. And barring the fountains and the handsome guy to kiss me in Times Square I did most of the things in most of the places Kerry and Ronan do - I like to think of it as field work.
And believe me - I hope to do a great deal more of it...But as well as personal experience I also got to indulge a dream or two on paper. Where would you have sent them if you'd been me? I even asked the lovely lovely gang over at The Pink Heart Society Yahoo Loop for places 'off the beaten track' as Ronan is a travel writer and would know all those places, right? The response was over-whelming! And with members all over the world I got a TONNE of places I now have in a file for future reference. So THANK YOU LADIES!
In the end I added a lot of places I researched and just thought - WOW - I wanna go there and do that! It's my story after all. I took them to San Francisco 'cos that's where I'm hoping to be in the summer of 2008 - I took them to the most gorgeous paradise of an island in Fiji because, heck, do I have to explain why? Then while trying to pin down one place for them to visit in Australia I thought to myself - would you really go all that way to that gorgeous country and only visit the one place? I wouldn't. With that in mind I tripped across the Great Southern Pacific railway; taking passengers a-la-Orient-Express all along the coast from Sydney to Brisbane to the Great Barrier Reef to... well... again - I wanna go!!! And having taken Kerry to such an amazing place in Fiji Ronan really had to pull something out of the hat that was on a par with that fantasy. By now, understandably, I'm a little in love with Ronan myself.
All in all there isn't a single place in this book I haven't either visited or really, really want to some time in the future. I'm thinking of making a list like Kerry's as it happens..
.And how better to wrap up the story than with a proposal by the Fontaine du Medici in the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris followed by a dream wedding in Kinnity Castle in Ireland? Really doesn't get much better than that.
Now where did I leave my passport?
Trish
The Millionaire's Proposal is out in September 2008 and is The Autumn Bride in our Bride For All Seasons mini-series.
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