12 Stocking Stuffers

Overview

Get out the mistletoe! Twelve days of Christmas...twelve stories filled with the magic of holiday romance...perfect reading for a snowy winter's day. Bundle includes Faith, Hope and Love, The Christmas Bride, Christmas Passions, A Seasonal Secret, Return of the Light, Star Light, Star Bright, Naughty or Nice?, Christmas Fantasy, A Christmas Marriage Ultimatum, A Prince for Christmas, The Millionaire's Christmas Wish and Merry Christmas, Baby

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Author Information

Bio of Beverly Barton

New York Times bestselling author Beverly Barton has written over fifty contemporary romance novels and created the popular "The Protectors" series for Silhouette's Intimate Moments line. This sixth-generation Alabamian is a two-time Maggie Award winner, a two-time National Reader's Choice Award winner, and a recipient of a Romantic Times Career Achievement Award for Series Romantic Adventure. She is currently working on her next novel of romantic suspense for Zebra Books. Readers can visit her website at www.beverlybarton.com.

Bio of Heather Graham Pozzessere

Heather grew up in Dade County, Florida, and attended the University of South Florida at Tampa, majoring in theater arts and touring Europe and parts of Asia and Africa as part of her studies. After college, she acted in dinner theaters, modeled, waitressed, and tended bar. After the birth of her third child, she was determined to devote her efforts to her writing: her dream. She sold her first book in 1982. Today, this author's success is reflected not just by reader response and the over 20 million copies of her books in print, but in many other ways. In addition to being a New York Times bestselling author, Heather has received numerous awards for her novels, including over 20 trade awards from magazines such as Romantic Times and Affaire de Coeur, bestseller awards from B. Dalton, Waldenbooks, and BookRak, and several Reviewers' Choice and People's Choice awards. Heather has appeared on Entertainment Tonight, Romantically Speaking, a TV talk show that aired nationwide on the Romance Classics cable channel, and CBS Sunday News. She has been quoted in People and USA Today, been profiled in The Nation, and featured in Good Housekeeping. Her books have been selections for the Doubleday Book Club and the Literary Guild. She has been published across the world in more than 15 languages and has published over 70 titles, including anthologies and short stories. Somehow, this prolific author manages to juggle it all - family, career, and marriage - while reaching a level of success to which few can aspire.

Bio of Catherine Spencer

Catherine Spencer fell into writing by happy accident. Approaching menopause and ready for a change of career while she could still walk and chew gum at the same time, she eavesdropped on a conversation about writing for Harlequin and decided this was too good a challenge to pass up. With the blithe ignorance of a non-swimmer leaping into a shark-infested pool, she resigned from her job as a high school English teacher and fired off her first submission to Harlequin Mills & Boon's editorial staff. Although her first two submissions were rejected, the third effort made the grade. Since then, she's sold over 25 books; 24 of them to Harlequin and most of them selected for the Presents Line. The Loving Touch, her third novel, was a short contemporary finalist for the Romance Writers of America's prestigious RITA Award.

Bio of Diana Hamilton

Diana Hamilton was born in a town. Wanting to be a country child, her imagination came into play at an early age, transforming a neighbor's tree into a forest, a hole in a stone wall into a gingerbread house, a gas puddle into a fairyland, complete with mountains, lakes, and flower meadows. She loathed housework but made to do her share, to lessen the boredom, she told herself stories, in a very loud voice, featuring princesses and flower gardens, discovering that telling herself stories was almost as good as reading them in a book. She loathed school with an equal passion and got through it by pretending to be somewhere else. Even so she left grammar school with respectable grades... And was sent to art college when she wanted to study to be a vet. This was nowhere as bad as it had seemed because it was there, at age 18, she first saw Peter. He had returned from two years' active service in Korea to resume his studies, and Diana immediately fell in love with him. Gaining a degree in Advertising Copywriting, Diana worked as a copywriter and married Peter. They moved to a remote part of Wales after the birth of their second child, Paul, when their daughter, Rebecca, was three years old. There, Diana enjoyed pony trekking and walking in the mountains; and her third child, Andrew, was born. Itchy feet brought them back to England to the beautiful county of Shropshire four years later and they have been there ever since, gradually restoring the rambling Elizabethan manor that Diana gave her heart to on sight, creating a garden out of a wilderness of nettles, brambles, and old bedsteads. In the mid-70s Diana took up her pen again to write stories to read to her three children at bedtime. These were never offered for publication but the bug had bitten. Over the next 10 years she combined writing over 30 novels, published by Robert Hale of London, with bringing up her children, gardening, and cooking for the restaurant of a local inn -- a wonderful excuse to avoid the dreaded housework! In 1987 Diana realized her dearest ambition -- the publication of her first Mills & Boon romance, Song in a Strange Land. She had come home. And that feeling persists to this day as, around 30 Harlequin/Mills & Boon romantic novels late, she is still in love with the genre.

Bio of Maggie Shayne

Maggie Shayne began her writing career in kindergarten, when she painstakingly copied The Brementown Musicians onto construction paper in full Crayola color, complete with illustrations of her own design, and presented it proudly to her teacher. Of course this was not an exact copy. She had tweaked the story a bit, improving it greatly, in her five ' year ' old opinion. By third grade her tastes had matured. At story hour, when it was her turn to choose the book from which the teacher would read, Maggie picked Poe ' s The Tell ' Tale Heart, which she proceeded to recite from memory as the teacher began reading. Far from being suitably impressed, Maggie recalls her teacher seemed to pale a bit, and looked at her oddly from then on. Her fondness for the macabre stayed with her, as did her penchant for rewriting her favorite stories. As a teen, while watching her beloved Universal Pictures Monster Classics over and over, she became more and more certain someone had to fix the endings. It was so obvious that Dracula, the Wolfman, and the dusty Mummy had been cheated! These were not horror flicks, in her teenage opinion. They were romances. They portrayed a love that went beyond life itself. But the endings were all wrong. Anyone could see the monster was supposed to get the girl! Well, one marriage and five daughters later, Maggie has made it her mission in life to see to it that old wrongs are set right. Her stories range from down ' home Westerns (Texas Brand miniseries, Silhouette Books) to glitz (Million Dollar Marriage, 8/99) to modern ' day fairy tales (her Avon contemporary titles). But her best love is the genre known as paranormal romance. And Maggie writes these like no other author. No one else writing today manages to combine the hearts of two such diverse genres as romance and horror, while still thrilling both segments of the readership with the stunning results. Shamelessly romantic, breathtakingly emotional, chilling in their suspense, with edge ' of ' the ' seat tension, her stories capture the classic allure that makes beauty ' and ' the ' beast tales so beloved ' the key, is the redemption of the monster by the sheer power of love.

Bio of Anne Stuart

Anne Stuart is a winner of Romance Writers of America's Lifetime Achievement Award. She's appeared on most bestseller lists, including the New York Times and USA Today, and speaks all over the country. Her most recent novel is Ice Blue, now available from Mira Books

Bio of Stephanie Bond

Stephanie Bond was seven years deep into a computer career and pursuing a master's degree at night when an instructor remarked she had a flair for writing and encouraged her to submit to academic journals. Once the seed was planted, however, Stephanie immediately turned to creating romance fiction in her spare time. "I never saw myself as a comedy writer, until a Harlequin editor asked if I could write comedy. I lied and said not only did I write comedy, but I had a great idea for a book she might be interested in, and shot her an idea from the top of my head. When she said she liked it, I told her I had three chapters finished to send her right away. Then I went home and wrote like a madwoman. That book was my first Harlequin comedy, Irresistible." Harlequin purchased Irresistible from Stephanie in the fall of 1995 for their Love and Laughter line. In another two years, she left her computer career to write full-time. She now writes for the Harlequin Temptation and Harlequin Blaze lines, having gained notoriety for her spicy romantic comedies, such as Too Hot to Sleep and It Takes a Rebel.

Bio of Janelle Denison

Janelle Denison is the USA Today bestselling author of many novels, including Wilde Thing, The Wilde Side, and Too Wilde to Tame.

Bio of Helen Bianchin

Helen grew up in New Zealand, an only child possessed by a vivid imagination and a love for reading. She wrote stories for amusement in her early teenage years, and when she left leaving school, she took a secretarial job at a father-and-son legal firm. Helen's hobbies are tennis, table-tennis, judo, reading. She loves movies, and leads an active social life. At age twenty-one Helen joined a girlfriend and embarked on a working holiday in Australia, travelling via cruise ship from Auckland to Melbourne. Alas, no shipboard romance, as she spent all four days in her cabin suffering from sea-sickness! After fifteen months working in Melbourne, Helen and her friend bought a vehicle and took three months to drive the length and breadth of Australia, choosing to work in Cairns in order to fund the final leg of our journey to Sydney. It was in Cairns that Helen met her future husband, Danilo Bianchin, an Italian immigrant from Treviso. He was a tobacco sharefarmer from the tobacco farming community of Mareeba. His English was pitiful, and her command of Italian was nil. Six months later they married, and Helen was flung into cooking for up to nine tobacco pickers, stringing tobacco, feeding 200 chickens, a few turkeys, ducks...plus killing, cleaning and cooking the same! Her knowledge of Italian improved, and there were hilarious moments in retrospect. Some of what she endured was cooking on a wood-burning stove, having no running hot water, a primitive shower and toilet facilities, washing uniforms for two soccer teams during the soccer season...floods, horrendous hailstone damage to tobacco crops, hardship, and the stillbirth of their first child. Then, to their joy, Helen's daughter, Lucia, was born. Three years later the couple returned to New Zealand, where they settled for sixteen years. During those early years, they added two sons, Angelo and Peter, to the family, and, on telling anecdotes of farm life in an Italian community to friends, the idea of writing a book occurred. A romance, set on a tobacco farm in Australia's far north, Queensland, featuring an Italian hero. Helen says, "the background was authentic, believe me!" However the hero was rich and owned the farm...artistic license! It took her a year to complete a passable manuscript, typed on a portable typewriter at the dining room table. That first effort was deemed too short with insufficient detail. Helen rewrote it. This time it was considered too long with too much extraneous detail. She revised, then sent it to London. Four months later she received a telegram from Alan Boon to say they intended to publish and a contract would be sent in the mail. It was the most wonderful news! Helen wrote ten more books while living in New Zealand, then in 1981, her family resettled in Australia, on Queensland's Gold Coast. She has since published twenty-five more books. She loves creating characters, giving them life and providing a situation where their emotions are tested and love wins out. Today, with computer technology, the mechanics of writing are much easier. However, the writing process doesn't change. Helen says that she's having a good day if she can achieve 5 good pages, which she is likely to change, edit and rewrite the following day. For her, the greatest praise is for a reader to say they couldn't put the book down...then Helen knows that she has achieved what she set out to do--"create a moving enjoyable story which holds the reader entertained from beginning to end."

Bio of Rebecca Winters

Rebecca Winters, an American writer and mother of four, lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. When she was 17, she went to boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, where she learned to speak French and met girls from all over the world. Upon returning to the U.S., Rebecca developed her love of languages when she earned her B.A. in secondary education, history, French, and Spanish from the University of Utah and did postgraduate work in Arabic. Because of her studies overseas, Rebecca decided to become a teacher and studied French and history at her alma mater in Utah. For the past 15 years, she's taught junior-high and high-school French and history, and says she got into serious writing almost by accident. "I went through a back door to begin my writing career," she says. "In the first place, I never liked to write anything--I only wrote mandatory papers for school. If anyone had told me I would become a writer, let alone love it, I would have laughed and dismissed the notion as absolutely absurd and preposterous. "Having said that, I did write letters to my parents while I was away at boarding school when I was 17. My mother kept them and one day, after I had become a mother for the second time, she sent me all my old letters and asked me to write my memories from them for posterity. At the time I thought she was insane, but because I adore my mother I did as she asked. "By the time I'd finished sorting through all those teenage thoughts, observations and opinions, the seeds of a story had begun to form in my mind. The seed eventually became a novel and was published in 1979. It was called The Loving Season, published under the name Rebecca Burton. Naturally, it takes place in Switzerland and France. "As soon as I finished that novel, I found myself wanting to start another novel entitled By Love Divided, a World War II romance. A few years later, Harlequin bought a novel, Blind to Love, a story that takes place in Kenya. It's been a love affair ever since. "I guess the moral of the story is, never underestimate a mother's intuition!". As Rebecca has kept writing, her talents have not gone unrecognized. She has won the National Readers' Choice Award, the Romantic Times Reviewers' Choice Award, and has been named Utah Writer of the Year. Right now, Rebecca is working her way toward her 50th novel for Harlequin. She welcomes visitors to her web site at http://www.rebeccawinters-author.com.

Bio of Lucy Gordon

Lucy Gordon was born in England, where she still lives with her Italian husband. She wanted to be a writer all her life, and began by working on a British womenýs magazine. As a features writer, she gained a wide variety of experience. She interviewed some of the worldýs most attractive and interesting men, including Warren Beatty, Richard Chamberlain, Charlton Heston, Sir Roger Moore, Sir Alec Guiness. Single life was so enjoyable that she put marriage, and even romance, on the back burner, while she went about the world having a great time. Then, while on vacation in Venice, she met a tall, dark handsome Venetian, who changed all her ideas in a moment, and proposed on the second day. Three months later they were married ý and still are. Her friends said a whirlwind romance would never last, but so far itýs lasted nearly 30 years. Lucy now claims to be an expert on one particular subject. Italian men are the most romantic in the world. They are also the best cooks.

Bio of Monica Jackson

No bio available for Monica Jackson.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Harlequin Enterprises

Filesize

2.27 MB

Number of Pages

N/A

eBook ISBN

9781426810633