Tempting Evil was, in many ways, a hard book to write. Mainly because Full Moon Rising and Kissing Sin had left a lot of unanswered questions, and the time had come to start finding the answers.
Which is no easy thing to do when you’re an organic writer.
Yes, that’s right, I don’t plot. Not in the sense that I sit down and map out a course for each of my books. Generally I have a good idea of what I want to happen to my characters, and where I want the story to go, but for me, half the fun of writing is the exploration. I love sitting down in front of an empty computer page, and seeing where the characters and the story take me. Sometimes it’s to a far better place than what I could ever have plotted, and sometimes it’s much worse—and ends up requiring a whole lot of editing or even deleting. But such journeys all help keep the writing path interesting.
Of course, it was harder to do that with Tempting Evil. Full Moon Rising and Kissing Sin had been building up to a showdown, and now Riley needed to confront the man behind the DNA splicing—the man who had caused so much havoc in her life and who had forced her down a path she had never wanted to take.
Because, like it or not, she was now a guardian—a hunter killer, just like her brother. She might have taken that step reluctantly, but she knows there’s no escaping it now. And if she didn’t become every bit as good as her brother, she might not survive the hunting long enough to bring down the monster still trying to use her in his labs.
Realizing all that gave me the start for the story—Riley, training with her brother, learning what it takes to become a guardian. Of course, Riley is not one to give up her dreams lightly, so as one side of her life begins to take a new course, she hangs on even more fiercely to another, long cherished dream—meeting her soul mate, and settling down. And that dream begins to come closer to reality as two men vie for her attention—one a vampire long used to getting what he wants, and the other a werewolf who has no intention of letting a vampire getting in the way of what he’s already claimed as his.
Yet the man who hunts her could yet destroy everything and everyone she holds dear.
If the themes for the first two books were ‘what if’ and ‘what would you do’, then the question for this novel would have to be ‘how far’. Just how far would you go to stop the man who had wrecked your dreams and who threatened the life of someone you loved?
In Tempting Evil, that is the question Riley is faced with. And after everything that has been done to her, she finds the answer pretty damn simple.
Whatever it takes.
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