Love, being difficult – Valentine’s Day Blog Hop

To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. ~Rilke

Love is love, but some people don’t know how to handle love. It’s a fact. They have ideas, thoughts, dreams and hopes, but actual love… Well, that’s pretty terrifying in the light of day.

Take two people, strip them emotionally naked, and they’ll usually run from each other instead of toward one another. I know, most romance books will tell you the opposite (it’s why I get so annoyed with the genre), but the sad fact is that, in reality, we often let the scars of our past haunt the dreams of our possible futures. Our actions aren’t motivated by what we desire most, but by what we fear most.

Maybe it’s because love – real, honest love – pops up in the most unlikely of places. All the internal alarms go off, our vocabulary becomes filled with words like can’t and won’t and never and impossible. You’ve seen it. You may have lived it. You may be living it right now, still wondering what might have been if…

In my recent series, The Love of Wicked Men, I’m exploring this topic in a very convoluted way. The series is an erotic legal thriller, but underneath that there’s a dynamic at work between the two wounded men and their all-too-typical desire to seem aloof and uninterested. Of course, the opposite is true, but try to get them to admit it and you’ll probably fail. Drunk on power, lust, money, and revenge, they’re less than eager to open themselves to their real emotions. How typically male!

Get your FREE copy of Episode 1 from Smashwords during the course of this blog hop by entering code ES95W during checkout. (And don’t forget to join in the conversation about Wicked Men on Goodreads. It’s totally NSFW!)