Taken For Revenge, Bedded For Pleasure |
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The story behind the story...This was the book that marked the end of my post-sale honeymoon period; the one that made me seriously wonder whether the first three had been nothing more than happy accidents, because I found this one harder to write than the rest of its predecessors put together! The idea began with the opening scene, which takes place in an auction house. It was in the period of blissful exhaustion just after I’d submitted the Orlando and Rachel’s story (later to be titled Mistress: Hired for the Billionaire’s Pleasure) The children were home for the summer holidays and I was doing a bit of desultory ironing one morning while half-watching low rent daytime TV and thinking about the next book. I wanted a French setting, I knew that much, and I wanted to capture the atmosphere of languid late summer and the turning of the year and I wanted the relationship to be sensual and slow and simmering with unspoken emotion, but at that stage I had no idea who the characters might be. As one of those interminable programmes about people buying or selling stuff at auction came on I found myself getting quite caught up in the drama of the saleroom. We have a great auction house in the town where I live, and over the years I’ve picked up quite a few things there so I’m very familiar with the adrenaline rush of bidding against someone else for an object you’ve really set your heart on. Suddenly I knew I’d found the starting point for the story. Unfortunately the rest of it wasn’t so easy to come by! However, matters were significantly improved by my mental casting of James Franco, owner of the most beautiful mouth in Christendom, in the role of the hero. Olivier Moreau is a high-flying hedge fund manager with a ruthless streak a mile wide that conceals a desperate need for conspicuous success. He’s all about what’s on the surface, until his chance encounter with a beautiful girl and a seemingly valueless painting in a London auction house make him re-evaluate his outlook.
Art plays a significant role in the story, since it is a particular painting which brings Olivier and Bella together, but which is also responsible for keeping them apart. The painting in question, which is called La Dame de la Croix is entirely fictional, but Manet’s Olympia also makes an appearance in the book. Anxious, insecure Bella is wistfully envious of the shameless sexuality of Manet’s luscious nude. The girl in the painting has a power and a confidence that Bella can only aspire to, until Olivier unlocks those qualities in her.
The book starts out as a simple revenge plot, but of course such powerful emotions are never straightforward. To Olivier Bella is initially nothing more than a Lawrence—a member of the family who destroyed his father. But that’s only who she is on the surface. Underneath lies the woman who can make him put the past behind him. The MusicI’d intended to make Olivier cold and ruthless, but from the moment I heard the song ‘Look After You’ by The Fray it crept into my head and made me think about him from a different angle. In the same way that that became his song, Bella’s was ‘Underneath Your Clothes’ by Shakira, which again touches on that theme of what lies beneath the surface. And it’s a blooming great song. The strange thing about writing this book was that throughout I had no idea how it would end (Although I seriously hoped that Olivier and Bella would end up together...) The turn of events at Bella’s eccentric uncle’s house in the closing chapters took me completely by surprise but was, I suspect, influenced to some degree by the Papa Roach song. Weird. Not my usual listening material at all, but it worked at the time! To listen to the songs which inspired me, click below.    Extract from the book
From the book Taken for Revenge, Bedded for Pleasure
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