Caitlin Shanahan is a heroine in Seducing Cat (Meghan’s Playhouse Book One). She’s thirty-four. Our plot hinges on the fact that she’s finally given up on finding a man and has decided to purchase the house of her dreams—alone.
When this book was first released, more than one reader commented that thirty-four was way too young for any woman who wanted a partner to conclude it’s too late. Maybe that’s true – certainly the age of first marriage has risen in our culture, and lots of women choose to pursue careers into their mid-thirties or beyond before committing to a romantic partner.
Choosing to wait, though, is different from giving up hope, and this is where Cat finds herself. Is that realistic? Where does it come from? The book is a novella, so we didn’t fill much space with her backstory, other than to convey that her efforts to form relationships have been unsuccessful and painful. But one of us knows those experiences at a personal level – I was in my early thirties when my first husband announced he wanted a divorce.
Though I probably never ceased hoping for love at some level, I spent the next couple years believing it would never happen for me. It wasn’t a matter of wanting to avoid pain – I had simply come to the understanding that romantic love wasn’t in my future. I had started to explore buying a condo for myself when I met Mr. Kraft at the university where we were both teaching.
For now, I’ll spare you the details of the one-year-minus-one-day that transpired between our first date and our wedding, though snippets have turned up here and there in our stories. Finding love again later in life is a trope we love to re-visit in our fiction, and so far we haven’t set an upper age limit on who we might write. We have main characters in their sixties, and even secondary characters as old as their early seventies. Love – and hot sex, since we write erotic romance – are possible as long as we live and breathe. And huzzah for that!
BLURB
What could college English Professor Caitlin Shanahan ever have in common with the brash carpenter Kurt Davis? The sexy sprite Meghan Keenan, that’s what.
Level headed English Professor Caitlin Shanahan has finally earned tenure and purchased the century-old two-story house of her dreams in the college town of Burntside, Wisconsin—at thirty-four, she’d better face facts: her future is teaching college and writing plays, not falling in love. So why is she so drawn to foxy little hometown actress Meghan Keenan, who’s rented her upstairs apartment, or worse, to the girl’s gorgeous hunk of a lover Kurt Davis, a carpenter who’s never even been to college?
Twenty-year-old Meg has a plan. First she’ll seduce the reluctant professor, then she’ll share her sexual delights with both Cat and her brawny carpenter, and when she’s successfully brought them together, she can make her escape and explore what’s beyond the only town she’s ever lived in.
Kurt can’t stand the up-tight professor who’s hired him to build a gazebo and refurbish her old house—the house he wanted for himself. Even if Meg’s scheme succeeds, he knows Caitlin would never look at him twice. No need to go there in his fantasies…