“Every working woman needs a wife!”
My first editor was the one who uttered that memorable phrase, in an interview with a local television station when she was visiting my hometown. But honestly, hasn’t every working woman said (or at least felt) much the same thing? I know I have. Sometimes in the midst of juggling career and home, I’d have loved to have someone to stand in line at the post office, or take the car in for an oil change, or run by the library to get the reference book I needed, or bake a pan of brownies for the company due to arrive in an hour….
The sentiment — and that lovely phrasing — stuck with me, and years later when I set out to write a trilogy featuring three romance heroines, it popped into my head again.
What if… there was an agency which provided exactly that kind of help? Not a housecleaning service. Not a babysitting service. Those things are necessary too, of course — but my agency needed to be more than that. And oh, what possibilities there are!
Cassie, Sabrina, and Paige — three women who are making a career out of providing services to other busy people. They work for both women and men, actually, and they assist not only people too busy to do their own detail work but a few who fall short of knowing what to do and how to do it.
Their business is named Rent-a-Wife, and don’t ask me where that came from. It wasn’t long before I realized it was a bit of a chauvinistic handle, which is why each of the women says, at one time or another, that she wishes they’d named it something else. It doesn’t help that each of the heroes has a few bad jokes about the name, too.
Ah yes. Heroes. I’d spent so much time thinking about the business that I’d kind of let slip the idea that these were supposed to be romances.
And that’s where a low-grade fever, a really bad cough, a big fat pillow, and a recliner came in. I was suffering the most horrendous of colds, which moved on to become bronchitis or possibly pneumonia, and I spent several days stretched out in the recliner, hugging my pillow to ease the strain every time I coughed, and thinking about my three heroines and who these special women would fall in love with.
It’s pretty common in a series of romances for all the heroines to be connected by family or business or friendship, or for all the heroes to be connected. Sometimes it’s a mix. But usually it’s just one member of each couple who are part of the connecting web.
As I drifted in my cough-syrup-induced haze, however, out of nowhere came the notion, What if the heroes were also all connected? What if they were all involved in a business together, a business that would be interested in the services of a home-help agency as a perk for their employees?
That’s when Tanner Electronics came into being — and I had every bit as much fun figuring out how Jake, Caleb, and Austin fit together as I’d had with Cassie, Sabrina and Paige.
The result is three books which can each be read as a standalone — but if you read them together and in order, you’ll find some overarching threads and stories as well.
The series was first published by Harlequin. Now it’s been re-edited and rereleased and is available in ebook format. (See the Rent-a-Wife series here.) I hope you’ll enjoy!