Читать книгу The Giannakis Bride - Catherine Spencer - Страница 3

Some people know practically from birth that they’re going to be writers. CATHERINE SPENCER wasn’t one of them. Her first idea was to be a nun, which was clearly never going to work! A series of other choices followed. She considered becoming a veterinarian (but lacked the emotional stamina to deal with sick and injured animals), a hairdresser (until she overheated a curling iron and singed about five inches of hair off the top of her best friend’s head the day before her first date) or a nurse (but that meant emptying bedpans. Eee-yew!). As a last resort, she became a high school English teacher, and loved it.

Eventually, she married, had four children and always, always, a dog or two or three. How can a house become a home without a dog? she asks. How does an inexperienced mother cope with babies if she doesn’t have a German-shepherd nanny?

In time, the children grew up and moved out on their own—as children are wont to do, regardless of their mother’s pleading that they will remain babies who don’t mind being kissed in public! She returned to teaching, but a middle-aged restlessness overtook her and she looked for a change of career.

What’s an English teacher’s area of expertise? Well, novels, among other things, and moody, brooding, unforgettable heroes: Heathcliff, Edward Fairfax Rochester, Romeo, Rhett Butler. Then there’s that picky business of knowing how to punctuate and spell, what the rules of sentence structure are and how to break them for dramatic effect. They all pointed her in the same direction: breaking the rules every chance she got, and creating her own moody, brooding, unforgettable heroes. And where do they belong? In Harlequin Presents novels, of course, which is where she happily resides now.