The Summer Bride ~ Behind The Scenes

The inspiration…

What would you do if you had to say ‘yes’ to every question you were asked? I spotted a similar sentence on a tag line of a New Year article in a magazine. I’m sure you know the sort of article I’m talking about. The kind that encourages you to take up new hobbies and embrace strange fads. I stopped in my tracks and didn’t even bother to read the rest. The lightning bolt had already struck and an idea for a story was brewing. A nice, ordinary girl could get herself into all sorts of trouble if she accepted a challenge like that, couldn’t she?

This spark of a story then combined with another idea. I absolutely love the hit TV show ‘The Amazing Race’ in which teams race each other around the globe trying to beat each other to a million dollars and had been waiting for an excuse to throw a hero and heroine into that pressure-cooker situation where everything they’d been trying to hide would come bubbling to the surface.

And why send them racing round the globe, I thought, when they have the wonderful cosmopolitan city of London on their doorstep? So I set the entire book in London and learned some very interesting facts about the city in the process. So, because she can’t say no to Josh, Fern ends up partnering him in a treasure hunt that last four days. All they have is £10, the clothes on their backs and each other. I’m not telling you if they find the treasure first or not – you’ll have to read the book to find out!

Heroine…

Fern Chambers is a risk analyst for a big insurance company. She spends her days weighing up how dangerous everything is and working out how to avoid it. Unfortunately, that philosophy has spread into her personal life too. Her much-loved older brother died of cancer when she was just a child and, since then, her parents have done their best to protect Fern from the big, bad world. Fern thinks she’s broken free of her parents’ suffocating influence, but old habits die hard and some attitudes and behaviours are so ingrained that it’s going to take a catastrophe to shake her loose…

Hero…

Josh Adams is the boy next door – literally. He was Fern’s brother’s best friend and the boy Fern had a gigantic crush on growing up. In contrast to safety-conscious Fern, Josh is an adventurer and a wanderer, never happy unless he’s moving – preferably at high speed with an accompanying adrenaline rush. Now he’s back in town and has decided to rope Fern into helping him out in the Secret London treasure hunt.

Only he hadn’t anticipated noticing how much ‘little’ Fern has grown up, or the sudden need to plant kisses on her in front of major London landmarks. So, as Fern and Josh race around London, they discover surprising things about the magical city, about themselves and especially about each other…

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