Author Guest Blog/Giveaway - Radiant Desire By Inara Scott (Entangled Publishing)

About the Book

The object of every man’s fantasy just lost her wings…
Kaia Verde is one of the four Faerie Handmaids of Zafira, Queen of the Fey. To redress an
ancient wrong done to Zafira by a human king, the Handmaids make sport of mortal men,
seducing and humiliating them. When Kaia sets out to seduce Garrett Jameson, but ends up
being the one surrendering to pleasure, Zafira is furious. Kaia’s punishment is simple: make
Garrett fall in love with her by the summer solstice, then break his heart, or face eternity without
her wings—or her soul. To make the task harder, Zafira tells Kaia she cannot use her faerie
magic or charm to lure Garrett into her bed.

…and now she’s losing her heart…
Kaia thinks her task will be relatively easy—as a faerie, she understands lust, and can love be
much different? But once she is living among the humans, Kaia discovers the race she once
disparaged is far more complex and beautiful than she imagined. She learns before she can
break Garrett’s heart, she must find a way to heal it. And eventually, discovers that losing her
wings may be a far easier price to pay than losing her heart.



Do Clothes Make the Man (or Woman?

by Inara Scott

I recently got a dramatic new look: I cut my hair from shoulder-length to a pixie, and let me tell you, it’s short. And totally different. The strangest thing about my transformation is that I now feel obliged to wear earrings, necklaces, and hip outfits. I’m not kidding. I feel like I have to live up to my hair!

Generally, though, this is a good thing. I’ve been living a little too long in my stay-at-home-mom-bob, yoga pants, and sweatshirts. I don’t mean to criticize this look (that would be like criticizing my second skin!). But sometimes you get too comfortable. The routine becomes a way of checking out. And while I don’t want to obsess about my appearance, I do want to continue to feel like a sexy, beautiful woman.

The haircut is helping me do this.

Clothes, hair, accessories…they have an incredible power to change our mood, our thoughts, even our personality. When I put on my lawyer suits, I take myself more seriously. When I wear big dangly earrings, I feel younger. More artistic. More, well, interesting.

As a writer, I am constantly learning about my characters through the lens of my own experiences. And this experience has renewed my fascination with makeovers. New hair, clothes, jewelery—it’s incredible how this can affect our characters.

Take Kaia, the heroine in my faerie romance, Radiant Desire. When she is forced to change from faerie to human, she goes from wearing six-hundred dollar evening gowns and staying in boutique five-star hotels, to picking her clothes out of a bin at a homeless shelter. This changes her. It must. She becomes less sure of herself, but also more aware of other people. She learns more about who she really is, while gaining an appreciation for her flawed, imperfect exterior.

The wonderful thing is, by become flawed, Kaia becomes even more attractive to Garrett, the object of her desire. (Though, of course, she doesn’t know that!) Here’s Garrett’s reaction to seeing her for the first time after her transformation:

He couldn’t say that she’d somehow become plain, or even that she looked entirely comfortable in Rachel’s house. She was too tall, too striking, her eyes too exotic, her features too captivating. Looking at her was like finding a single rose in a garden filled with daisies.

Yet this was not the same woman he had known.

As he continued to stare, her chin jutted nervously forward, and he realized the true difference between the Kaia he’d known and this new Kaia: her air of vulnerability. The woman he met just two weeks ago had been supremely self-assured, wearing an air of confidence in everything she did and every move she made. This woman was vulnerable. This woman did not know how she would be received.

This woman, amazingly enough, did not know how beautiful she was.

Yet somehow, now that she’d lost that air of otherworldly perfection and confidence and her flaws had been revealed, she had become even more attractive.

Have you ever had a makeover, or even just a dramatic hair cut? How did you feel afterward? Did you change?

Tell me your favorite makeover stories – there’s a free copy of Radiant Desire in it for one comment.