Over the Author

Let's listen in on author Leigh Michaels as she recalls the process she worked through in order to create the characters and storyline in her contemporary romance, The Takeover Bid.

"It was time to write another office romance --I hadn't written for a while about two people falling in love as they work together. So I started thinking about different ways to bring the hero and heroine together very closely but also to create tension between them. Just having to work together on a project isn't usually enough to create the sort of tension I wanted.

The heroine

This book actually started with the heroine. I had a vision from the very start of a woman who had been handed a lemon and used it to make lemonade. In a sense, that's the very definition of a heroine -- a woman who looks honestly at the situation in her life and makes the best of it, no matter how awful it is. And what I had vaguely in mind for this particular heroine was pretty awful.

What if she owns a business she didn't want, doesn't like, but can't get rid of? She can't sell it, she can't give it away. And then I asked, what if the hero is an equally unwilling partner in that business?

Keeping them heroic and sympathetic

But how could two people end up as unwilling partners with neither of them knowing what they were getting into in time to back out of the deal? Surely before anyone paid good money for half a business, they'd look into the circumstances. And even if they inherited it, they'd have some idea of the situation they were getting into. Besides, I wanted it to be an established business, not one they were just learning about.

So how else could someone end up owning half a business? "Win it at poker,@ my husband said, only half-joking -- and suddenly the story began to come into focus.

Of course, that kind of gambling is illegal -- not a good move for a hero or heroine. Besides, a hero or a heroine who gambles on that kind of scale isn't terribly sympathetic, so I had to figure out how I could have both of them involved in such an outcome without making them look addicted or compulsive. Enter the silent partner, Jackson -- who is presented from the very first as being capable of all kinds of shady behavior.

The hero

Still, even if Jackson lost the business at poker, how could Wyatt win it without being just as guilty? And B contradictory though the question sounds B why did it matter so much to my heroine? Why was it such a big deal that he played poker for high stakes?

One of the questions I ask myself as I plot a story is, "Why are these two people seemingly the worst possible combination -- the very worst couple to fall in love?" In this case, the answer was easy and fairly obvious -- if a woman's been hurt by a gambling father, the worst person she could possibly get involved with would be another gambler. That's why it matters so much to her. And that fit well with my lemon idea, too -- for years, Melanie has been suffering the consequences of her father's gambling. Long after his death, she's still stuck with the only asset he had when he died. Rather than being able to follow her dreams, she's been running a junkyard.

The setting

I certainly didn't set out to write a book about a junkyard -- or an exotic car business, either, for that matter -- and so when this book "wanted" to happen in a car lot, I tried to fight off the idea. I never was one to have my head in the engine of a car or fiddle with things like carburetors, so I knew I'd have a lot of research to do. But, though it drives non-writers nuts to hear it, sometimes stories and characters just won't be or do what the author wants.

In this case, the story just wouldn't happen against any other background. I finally realized that was because the junkyard formed such a stark dramatic contrast to what my heroine had wanted to do with her life, a contrast that no other sort of business would have been able to do.

Still, Melanie was Melanie, and it didn't quite match up with her character that she'd be running a junkyard, because she'd have turned it into something more -- something to be proud of. That was when Classical Cars came into being, one-time lemons that Melanie has turned into exotic collector's items.

Then it made sense -- the business fit with Melanie and with the story. So I gave up trying to find something else, and I started reading Dupont's Auto Registry for unique old cars and picking the brains of every guy around me about what makes a classic car classic. I learned a lot more than I wanted to know about transmissions (none of it useful) but I hope that Melanie's knowledge is believable and convincing.

More about the heroine

In the meantime, I wondered what Melanie had wanted to do instead, and why she couldn't just walk away from the business and follow her dream.

What if it was an expensive sort of dream, one that would be a long time in the making and with a good chance of never quite succeeding? That would make it very hard to give up a certain living -- even if she didn't like the job -- and take a chance on something else. That's when I thought about medical school. It's expensive, it's time-consuming, there's no guarantee of success, and it's about as far from running a junkyard as it=s possible to get.

Melanie's dog popped up as I wrote the first scene -- it just seemed to me that a junkyard needed a dog, and a junkyard owner might like having one around for protection. But I didn't know about Scruff's gift for sniffing out sick kids until later, when Melanie went off to visit the children's ward and took him along.

Meanwhile, I was still thinking about Wyatt and how he'd gotten dragged into that poker game. I just knew he wasn't a gambler -- at least not in the ordinary sense of the word. Taking chances to help somebody -- that's another thing entirely, and I guess that makes him a gambler of another sort. In fact, that wish to help is the essence of Wyatt's character, and he says so himself -- "You have got to curb your Don Quixote instincts, Reynolds!" So whatever it was which got him involved in Jackson's business, he thought he was helping. I concluded he'd bought out Jackson in an effort to help a friend -- or rather, the daughter or sister of a friend, who was involved with Jackson.

And as often happens, one of the first things that I knew about the story -- the poker game -- was one of the last things that the reader finds out, at the end of chapter nine. I often find myself keeping a secret from the reader, and working with characters who are keeping secrets from each other. I find that telling too much too fast ruins the suspense, while letting someone keep a secret often makes the entire story work better.

Of course, once I'd saddled Melanie and Wyatt with the business, I had to get them out of it -- and I must admit that I knew the answer to that one from page one. That's why Robbie's the first secondary character who appears, and that's why he's shown as working extra hours to get a car just right -- because it makes him a perfect potential owner. And after all that talk about Melanie's gift for understanding sick kids, how could I do anything else but send her to med school -- with a patron to make sure she doesn't have to eat oatmeal three times a day to keep her debts in line?

At last, the story was ready to go -- with a heroine, a hero, a problem, and a solution. Some of the events along the way were still hazy in my mind -- they would develop as I wrote -- but the basics were in place. Then it was time to write.