Sharda did not know where she was going, only that she wanted to be as far away as possible from those approaching feet. Hastening down the tight avenues, she turned at random at each hedgy intersection…until she struck a dead end. A dead end that grabbed her with two hands.
She should scream. All that came out of her lips was a startled squeak.
“Oh! So, you’re not some brigand but”—her captor’s hands padded up Sharda’s arms—“a lady. Well, thank god for that. You gave me a scare and make no mistake.”
This stranger could not be gladder than Sharda at discovering the other’s sex.
A Highland Hogmanay
Romance authors are always on the lookout for good meet-cutes. Ironically, we often force our characters to have no idea where they’re going to pull them off. In my new book, I half blinded my two main characters by staging their first meeting in a formal English garden filled with tall hedges. At night time. Both women are already on the move when they collide. Sharda Holkar is an English heiress who’s looking to escape her controlling relatives, and their determination to keep the dowry given her by her Indian father in the family. Fin Forbes, the estate manager of a Scottish castle, is desperately searching for the lord who owns the castle – and who owes her and her staff money. When they collide in the garden, it’s a case of instant attraction… and mistaken identity.
This is the second book in my Christmas Masquerade series, and I enjoyed the hell out my repeat visit to a masked ball on Christmas Eve in Victorian London. It allowed me another chance to play with how costumes allow the characters to both misread each other and reveal their truth. In the first Christmas Masquerade book, The Christmas Chevalier, the costumes concealed the main characters’ identities – they’re old friends – but the masks allow them to see each other in the right light. He looks across glittering ballroom and sees his governess friend is a sexy siren. She looks back and knows she’s looking at a dashing courtier. They dance. Nothing is ever going to be the same between them.
In A Highland Hogmanay, I had an entirely different challenge. Instead of a friend-to-lovers, I had to bring two strangers together with a mistaken identity twist. Instead of getting a good look at each other in the chandelier-lit ballroom, Fin and Sharda are in each other’s arms before catching even a glimpse. The darkness creates immediate intimacy. So far, so good! But what, I wondered, would my characters see when they met in the dark?
Maybe, with their masks on and veiled by the night, Sharda and Fin would see in the other something they long for in themselves. Sharda is determined that this is the year she will emancipate herself from her relatives’ control. So she’s immediately impressed with Fin’s self-command and independent flair. This fancy castle that Fin mentions is obviously hers! Fin is struggling to provide for her castle and her community, so she quickly takes in the costly fabric of Sharda’s gorgeous Venetian costume and perfect manners and assumes she’s a wealthy young woman. Both are painfully mistaken of course. And yet maybe the other person is just the right companion on their journey to discover that they had what they wanted inside themselves all along.
Another fun departure for this book, quite literally, was to move the action from London. And move on Christmas Day in a first-class railway carriage no less. While I was incredibly excited to set the holiday celebrations in a Highland castle – scenic! – I also had to wrestle with what it meant to portray a cross-cultural Romance. Fin is not just a Scotswoman, but a Highlander. I imagined sending, in the time-honoured Historicals tradition, another white English heiress north of the border. You know, the ones where the hero hates all the bastard sassenachs, but can’t help loving this one. After all, she’s just a wee lass. Yeah, that just wasn’t the right feel for this queer romance.
By making Sharda the daughter of a whirlwind romance between an Englishwoman and an Indian Raja, I wanted Fin’s heiress to be somebody who intimately understood what it was like have multiple cultural identities. Maybe I’ll write another blog on Scottish culture – and their castles – in the late nineteenth century, but, basically, the country’s position in the British Empire was a complex one. Historically impoverished by English colonialism, it’s now experiencing an imperial economic boom that’s felt even in the Highlands. Dundee, the nearest city to the castle, has a lucrative Jute trade directly with India.
I hope I’ve given Sharda and Fin backgrounds that are nicely balanced but, ultimately, they are both making a leap in the dark by falling for some gorgeous stranger they met at a London garden party. In a hedge. You can’t take away the jeopardy of falling in love, no matter how complimentary the characters. But, at least in this holiday romance, I could light up a Highland castle to help them find their way.
*A Highland Hogmanay is available now at all major ebook retailers.
