Teresa Southwick discovered her love for the written word because she was lazy. In a high school history class she was given a list of possible projects and she chose to do an imaginary diary of Marie Antoinette since it seemed to require the least amount of work.

But she soon realized that to come up with any plausible personal entries for poor Marie she needed to know a little something about the woman. Research was required. After all, Teresa sincerely wanted to pass the class. Nowadays, she finds that knowing as much as she can about her characters is more fun than it is work.

She is the author of 20 books, four of them historicals for which she had to do research. She s happy to say laziness played no part in the creative process and no brain cells were harmed in the writing of those books.She has no pets as her husband is allergic to anything with fur. Preserving her marriage seemed more expedient to her than having a critter curl up by her desk as she writes.

She was conceived in New Jersey, born in Southern California, and got to Texas as quickly as she could, where she s hard at work on a series for Silhouette Romance called Destiny, Texas. Never at a loss for inspiration or access to the male point of view, she s surrounded by men including her heroic, albeit allergy-prone, husband and two handsome sons.,

Kate Hewitt discovered her first Mills & Boon romance on a trip to England when she was thirteen and she's continued to read them ever since.

She wrote her first story at the age of five, simply because her older brother had written one and she thought she could do it, too. That story was one sentence long-fortunately, they've become a bit more detailed as she's grown older.

Although she was raised in Pennsylvania, she spent summers and holidays at her family's cottage in rural Ontario, Canada; picking raspberries, making maple syrup and pretending to be a pioneer. Now her children are enjoying roaming the same wilderness!

She studied drama in college and shortly after graduation moved to New York City to pursue a career in theatre. This was derailed by something far better-meeting the man of her dreams who happened also to be her older brother's childhood friend.

Ten days after their wedding they moved to England, where Kate worked a variety of different jobs-drama teacher, editorial assistant, church youth worker, secretary and finally mother.

When her oldest daughter was one year old, she sold her first short story to a British magazine, The People's Friend. Since then she has written many stories and serials as well as novels. She loves writing stories that celebrate the healing and redemptive power of love and there's no better way of doing it than through the romance genre!

Besides writing, she enjoys reading, traveling and learning to knit-it's an ongoing process and she's made a lot of scarves.

After living in England for six years, she now resides in Connecticut with her husband, an Anglican minister, her three young children and the possibility of one day getting a dog.