Thanks to a series of snowstorms unusual in this area of Texas, I’ve had a few non-scheduled days off to finish up the revisions on Max and Caroline’s book, (first of my new Ransleigh Rogue series.) Magnificent Max’s book has just been mailed back to my editor with fervent hopes that she will like the changes made. While she’s pondering the latest draft, I’m looking ahead to the next project, an Undone to accompany Max’s book that will feature heroine Caroline Denby’s cousin Elizabeth.

Beautiful, wealthy, impetuous Elizabeth fell deeply in love with a rake. Blinded by love and passion, she married him…and lived to bitterly regret it as Russell went through her money, her love, and most of the scandalous women in London. She’s a wiser, poorer, hurting and bitter widow when childhood friend Nathan returns to London. Nathan has always liked Elizabeth–and during her tempestuous marriage, often offered to help distract her from the pain of Russell’s infidelity by having an affair with him. When he repeats his offer, angry with men, fed up with being the Good Girl and the Good Wife, she agrees–but only if he is prepared to meet every extravagant whim of the woman who intends to become The Most Expensive Courtesan in London. I think it’s going to be lots of fun to write, as Elizabeth and Nathan engage in a battle of wits, with passion as their weapons and love the unintended result.

After that, it’s on to the second Rogue story. I had intended to do Alastair next: the poet and intellectual of the Rogues, when the woman he loves jilts him in the most public and humiliating way possible, he throws away his pen, joins the army, and vows never to love again. Selling out after Waterloo, he thinks he’s finally over Diana, until a chance meeting in Bath revives all his anger, pain and passion. Thinking to purge himself of her forever, he challenges her to become his mistress…

But now I’m torn. After Max’s book came to a resolution I hadn’t expected (those sneaky characters surprise you like that sometimes) I discovered that one of the other Rogues not only had a different name, but a different heroine. Rex became Will, and his heroine will be the woman who betrays Max at the Congress of Vienna, destroying Max’s chances of a diplomatic career. Will is horrified when he discovers Max has settled for life on a horse farm, far from the councils of government in which Will knows he would shine. Certain that Max cannot really want that life, and fiercely devoted to the man who saved him from the streets as a child, Will sets out for Vienna to find the mysterious Madame Lefevre and bring her back to England to testify to Alastair’s innocence–even if it means the gallows for her. But the complex, wounded woman he finds in Vienna isn’t anything like the heartless adventuress he expected…

So now I have until after I finish the Undone to dither over what next: Alastair or Will?