No, we’re not talking ice cream…today we have one of my very favorite writers as a guest, in both of her manifestations, and with a fantastic prize. So let’s get chatting and exchange our metal folding table stories–I mean, our proposal or Valentine’s day stories… you’ll see what I mean. Read on!

Thanks so much to the Riskies for having me—both of me—back! I write under two names, Maggie Robinson and Margaret Rowe, and I’m between Maggie’s January book, Mistress by Midnight, and Margaret’s March release, Any Wicked Thing. While both books are hot historical romances, Margaret’s book is just a little scorchier. Or as I like to say in my house, Margaret writes about things that Maggie has never done. 😉

I do like to think, though, that I incorporate plenty of romance in my erotic fiction, and I love to give second chances to my heroes and heroines. As we all know—or at least Shakespeare said so and who am I to argue—“the course of true love never did run smooth.” That’s certainly true for Sebastian Goddard, the Duke of Roxbury and his childhood nemesis Frederica Wells in Any Wicked Thing. They could not have started off in a more humiliating fashion (really, I was absolutely evil making their first encounter a night to forget instead of remember), but somehow they manage after a decade to put the past behind them.

Their journey to The End is almost the opposite of Laurette and Con’s in Mistress by Midnight, who begin beautifully but are torn apart and have a whole lot of boulders to climb over as adults. But we must torture our characters, or the books we love would sputter out after the first chapter…or maybe even the prologue.

Some of my favorite books and movies incorporate the awkward and the angsty with the amorous. I think Lord Chesterfield had it right when he said: “Sex: the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.” Human beings are so…human. We’re all searching for our happily ever after, one clumsy step at a time and sometimes travel in circuitous routes to get there.

It may be Valentine’s Day tomorrow, but sometimes love feels more like April Fools. One commenter today will get both Maggie and Margaret books AND a new DVD, Romantic Favorites Collection, with four fantastic, funny movies that illustrate exactly how beautiful and bittersweet relationships can be. Of the four films on this disc, Love Actually is probably my favorite, as it is a kaleidoscope of emotion. I’m sure you can guess that my favorite scene has earnest Colin Firth proposing in fractured Portuguese—it makes me laugh and cry at the same time, my own personal romance rule.

Do you have a proposal story or a Valentine’s memory? Tell us!

I’ll share mine. My boyfriend and I threw a party so his friends could meet my friends, and he casually announced to everyone, “Yeah, we’re getting married.” He never really asked, but I guess I answered, because we were married three months later. This is the same man who gave me a metal folding table for the basement so I could stack laundry as a Valentine’s present. He’d better come up with something a little better tomorrow.