Scribbling Women & the Real-Life Romance Heroes Who Love Them

by Hope Tarr

  I was still reeling from the six-year relationship breakup, and he was—at this time—already dating two women. Busy guy! (Again, quite deserving of his Reputation!) But we found we had a lot in common, beyond the fact that we’d shared mouth space a few weeks prior.

  We were both English majors. We loved puns. We knew a lot about music and liked some of the same groups. We liked seeing live bands. We had the same political leanings. We knew the corporate job path wasn’t for us. We were loyal. We both liked basketball and watching Soul Train on Saturday mornings. We were having fun getting to know one another.

  If I hadn’t taken that risk, if I hadn’t asked myself, What’s the worst that happens? You hang out with a guy who isn’t right for you who is very nice to look at? Maybe you get kissed a lot? That’s not so bad, I wouldn’t have become the person I am today, with the man I’m married to, with a fabulous kid. I would have stayed safe, not taken risks—and not grabbed his ass.

  Perhaps the lesson of my life shouldn’t be “grab that ass,” but then again, maybe it’s the best advice I can offer.

  Megan Frampton writes historical romance under her own name and romantic women’s fiction as Megan Caldwell. Her Megan Frampton title, What Not to Bare, was one of Barnes and Noble’s books that are “too sexy to read in public.” She likes the color black, gin, dark-haired British men, and huge earrings, not in that order. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her husband and son. Visit her online at www.meganframpton.com.

  Crossing the Pond

  By Mary B. Rodgers

  MARY: Simon and I met in September of 2011 at the Stone Street Oyster Festival in New York City, on one of those cool, sun-drenched fall days when the sky is a perfect cobalt blue and the air so clear that you feel like you can see into outer space.

  It was a setup job by a mutual friend, so I didn’t get my hopes up. On my way there I became lost amid the tangle of Lower Manhattan’s ancient and distinctly un-gridlike layout of streets. After a good half hour of frustration, I emerged out of yet another dead-end alleyway and found a string of bored cops watching a small protest march. Much later, I realized that protest marked the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

  With great assurance, the cops pointed me in precisely the wrong direction from where I needed to go.

  SIMON: The exact same thing happened to me!

  MARY: I found the festival soon after and met up with my friends for a boozy afternoon of fried oysters and Prosecco.

  Eventually, we moved up Stone Street to the venerable Harry’s Bar, and Simon showed up. I definitely thought he was cute, and as our conversation shifted easily from a discussion of pop music to parsing social justice themes in our favorite books, I realized that he was very bright as well.

  SIMON: She was smitten, of course.

  MARY: Well, not yet—

  SIMON: I thought she was very pretty and charming.

  MARY: Simon was living in London at the time. He’d spent thirteen years working in New York but had decided to return to his home country for a while.

  We began a fairly lively e-mail correspondence that culminated with me flying over to visit for a week in November. I rented a cute flat in Notting Hill, figuring that if Simon turned out to be a jerk, hell, I was in London! I was bound to have a good time.

  SIMON: I’ll have you know I was a perfect gentleman.

  MARY: Toward the end of my stay, we spent a passion-filled night together at his flat, and I had the great pleasure the next morning of having a beautiful man cook me breakfast. I should add that he was naked at the time. I was sipping a cup of tea and ended up wearing most of it, despite my determined efforts to seem cool. Smitten as I was by his—

  SIMON: Masculine splendor!

  MARY: Masculine…really, darling?

  SIMON: (nodding vehemently) I think that should be the running theme here—

  MARY: Of course you do. Anyway, we began a trans-Atlantic courtship between London and Manhattan. Prior to that I’d considered Brooklyn long-distance, so this was something of an adjustment. But as the months ticked by, our relationship deepened. And in December of 2012, Simon asked me to move to England to be with him.

  It was a big ask. I’d have to leave my friends, my family and my beloved New York City behind, and make a life for myself in a different country. But I’d never felt about anyone the way that I felt about Simon, and I’ve always believed that if you reach a point in your life when you won’t take a chance on a new adventure, you might as well stop living altogether.

  So even though I felt like I was about to leap off the edge of a precipice, I gathered my courage, took a deep breath…and jumped.

  Several months after I arrived in London, Simon took me on a hike up the very steep Bunster Hill in Dovedale, a gorgeous area in the English countryside distinguished by glacier-carved valleys, clear, fast-running rivers and thickets of impossibly tall ancient oak trees. I’d had a cold for a while and was operating at about fifty-percent lung capacity, so a climb that would have been strenuous on my best day required a Herculean effort to complete.

  SIMON: In my defense, I really had no idea at that point just how ill she still felt…

  MARY: I thought it was another guy test, to see how “cool” I was, so I wasn’t about to admit defeat. There I was, wheezing like a dying accordion on the top of a windswept mountain, early spring flowers just coming into bloom, the hills echoing with the bleating of baby lambs—I mean, I did appreciate the romance of it all, despite my lack of oxygen.

  SIMON: And I went down on one knee and proposed.

  MARY: It came as a complete surprise. Of course I said yes.

  Simon and I had both promised ourselves that when we found the right person, we’d have a proper church wedding. But the vagaries of the British visa system dictated a swifter timeline. A few weeks after Simon proposed, we were married at the local town hall with my stepmother and his best friend as our witnesses.

  Despite our unhappiness with the accelerated timetable and the lack of ceremony involved in the civil service, we both found ourselves tearing up as we held hands and repeated our vows. It turned out to be a very special day. We spent the remainder of the afternoon basking in the sunshine outside a local pub, quaffing bottle after bottle of champagne. And we comforted ourselves by setting plans in motion to have the church wedding for which we’d always hoped by the end of the year.

  Simon and I are born “doers.” Since I’ve been in London, our life together has been characterized by a mutual restlessness and sense of adventure. Weekends are for exploring and hiking and boating, not sleeping in.

  Thus far, we’ve been on numerous walks on the Thames Path, rowed an old-fashioned wooden skiff on the river all the way from Richmond to Hampton Court—

  SIMON: “We” rowed? Ahem. I believe that I performed the lion’s share of work on that one—

  MARY: I was steering! A very important job. And drinking wine.

  SIMON: Also very important.

  MARY: Indeed. I suppose it would have helped if either of us had paid attention to the tide table that day. We were no more than a half mile away from the Richmond Bridge Boathouse when the river turned against us. As it happened, this was a “king” tide, the highest tide of the year, which occurs when the sun, moon and Earth are closest in alignment. It’s also the most powerful.

  By the time we made it to the bridge right next to the boathouse, Simon was rowing so hard against a rushing wall of water that the skiff was practically standing on end.

  SIMON: Lesson learned…

  MARY: In less-strenuous pursuits, we’ve also played on the silk white sands of Camber Beach in Rye, strolled through the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris, swum in crystal-clear coves in Ibiza, cheered mightily for the rowers at the Henley Royal Regatta, listened to world-class musicians play at the Royal Albert Hall, sampled the latest vintages at England’s oldest winery and haunted countless charming pubs from Hammersmith to Waterloo.

  And in the time that I’ve been
here, I wrote another novel, Project Catchstar, a contemporary thriller featuring a funny, kick-butt heroine and a dashing Special Ops love interest.

  SIMON: (preening) I assume that I was the model for said love interest?

  MARY: But, of course, darling. Who else?

  Simon is incredibly supportive of my writing. I trust him completely, so much so that he is the first person to see even my earliest, most embryonic drafts.

  It’s not that he gives me endless accolades or soft-pedals his criticism. I trust him because he is honest in his opinions and genuinely interested in my work. Writing can be a lonely endeavor even at the best of times. I’m incredibly fortunate to have a loving husband who is my most passionate advocate. I didn’t think I’d ever find someone like Simon.

  I look forward every day to continued warmth, laughter and new adventures with my own real-life romance hero.

  A career performer and storyteller, Mary Rodgers was the keyboardist and lead vocalist in an all-female rock band for a number of years and has acted in leading roles in plays and musicals across the United States. Her first screenplay, Common Ground, won a finalist slot in the 2008 Moondance International Film Festival competition, and she is a member of the Screen Actors Guild/AFTRA and the New York chapter of Women in Film and Television. Project Catchstar, her New Adult action-adventure romance debut, released in December 2013. Visit Mary online at www.mary-rodgers.com.

  Thanks to Uisce Beatha (Water of Life)

  By Kat Simons

  When I moved to Dublin, Ireland, in 1997 to do my PhD in animal behavior, I was twenty-six years old, never getting married, writing romance novels, and wondering how on earth people actually met in real life. Romance novels always have these clever meet-up situations for contemporary stories, but I had no idea how people really met their mates. I was curious for the sake of my writing, though, not for my own personal efforts, because I wasn’t interested in having a relationship.

  For the record, I wasn’t avoiding marriage because I had anything against the institution. I write romance. I do like romance and love and marriage and all that stuff. I just didn’t see it happening for me. I never wanted to invest my time in someone else’s schedule. In the years before moving to Ireland, I had had a total of one two-month relationship. That was it. Nothing longer. Nothing more serious. I was okay with that because I wasn’t looking for anything more.

  I’ve just never been good at relationships. You know how women supposedly want a man to call the next day, say, after that first date or first meet-up? Not me. I usually wanted him not to call. And would you believe the bastards always called? It’s like inadvertent reverse psychology.

  Anyway, I ran from anything that might get serious and any man who wanted more from me than one night. I didn’t like to be beholden to anyone else. I wanted to do with my time what I wanted and not be subjected to another person’s demands. Time has always been my most valuable commodity, and I wasn’t prepared to spend that commodity on a man. So I avoided commitment.

  My mother wasn’t the least surprised to find out I’d started to lean away from a permanent relationship. I was more interested in travel, writing, friends, science, everything else there was to do in life. Thankfully, I have an artist mother who was good with this. Not having to deal with any nagging to “settle down” really helps when one has decided not to settle down.

  Moving to Ireland was an adventure designed to enjoy the country, get my advanced degree, see a new place and meet new people. But I didn’t actually think I’d date much.

  While my mother and I were hunting for a place for me to live in Dublin, a taxi driver warned me that I should be careful or I’d end up married to an Irishman. The comment was greeted by a lot of laughter on our part. This was so not happening. At least, not to me.

  The dadada of the inevitable reversal of expectations practically booms here, doesn’t it?

  I looked around for about a week and finally found a room in a house share. The house was a large Georgian place in Dun Laoghaire (pronounced duhn leery; don’t get me started on Irish spellings). In the upstairs part of the house, there were seven separate rooms for seven people. When I moved in, there were two other women and four men. In the basement of the house, our landlord lived with his wife and two young kids.

  Living in a mixed house was great fun. The people changed over the years, though a few were there the entire time I lived in the house. Everyone was really nice and easy to get along with—most of the time. We each had our own rooms over three floors, then shared two bathrooms, a sitting room and a kitchen that was just off the sitting room. The house was near the Dun Laoghaire pier so I had a view of the Irish Sea from my room and an excellent place to go for walks.

  We managed to keep the peace in the house really well, too. The landlord came upstairs and did our dishes or tidied when things got out of hand, so we never had to have that fight. The place was freezing in the winters, so we all hung out in the sitting room in front of the heater, watching whatever we could get on TV. Every once in a while, we’d play games or go drinking together. We even had the occasional party. It was a cozy arrangement. If you wanted to talk, there was almost always someone around to visit with. If you wanted to be alone, you had your bedroom to disappear in. I couldn’t have found a more perfect place to live as a newbie to Ireland.

  For the first six months, I was the odd man out, being an American. Everyone else was Irish, though from very different parts of Ireland—which meant I had to get used to a host of different accents! They accepted me in, despite this, and never once made me feel uncomfortable or like a stranger. Then a guy from Scotland moved in, and we both got to be the foreigners in the house. When his friends from Scotland came over for a visit and met with the thicker-Irish-accented members of the house, I ended up acting as a translator because, to me, they all sounded strange.

  I was living in the house for three weeks before I met the man who lived in the room on the ground floor. I walked into our sitting room late one night, and he was stretched out on the couch watching sports. We said a passing hello, and I walked into the kitchen, closing the door behind me. Then I hemmed. The guy on the couch was cute. And he looked tall! I have a particular soft spot for tall men. I’m tall-ish and have trouble feeling delicate and feminine with men smaller than I am. Personal bias I’m not proud of, but there you go. My men have to be tall.

  The ground-floor guy and I exchanged passing pleasantries off and on as I started my PhD fieldwork. I flirted a bit, but not seriously—and I’ve never been sure if he realized I was flirting with him. He’s the strong, silent type, so he’s really hard to read. We did get along well, and I liked sitting with him and talking. We didn’t have a lot in common outwardly. He was into sports. I had a passing interest but wasn’t a sports fanatic. I loved to read. He was mostly a newspaper and magazine guy who’d only just started to read books. He was an accountant. I was a scientist and a writer. He actually had a job and made money. I was a poor college student just starting to rack up my student loans. I was outdoorsy and had grown up with pets. He loved cities and had never owned so much as a goldfish. I’m a card-carrying pagan. He’s a Mass-going Catholic.

  If we’d been signed up on one of the online dating sites, we would never have been put together.

  But our seeming lack of common interests didn’t matter to me at the time. I wasn’t looking for anything to really happen between us. I definitely wasn’t on the hunt for a boyfriend. I was just flirting with a cute guy and thoroughly enjoying my new life in Ireland. Besides, he was my housemate, and hooking up with someone I lived with would complicate the living arrangement. I was nothing if not keen on avoiding complications in my life.

  In the meantime, I was out most days watching deer in the Phoenix Park, wearing canvas trousers, wellies, and an oversized coat, layered up with sweaters, scarves and gloves to stay warm. Not exactly an attractive look. (On a side note, because of the size of my coat and my height, I was often mistaken for a man out
in the field until people got close enough to see my face. See, not a very feminine look I had going.) There was no makeup, my hair was often tied up in a bun, and after the fieldwork, I mostly lounged around in pajamas—not the sexy type, either.

  At one point in September, ground-floor guy came home from work in a mood and wanting a drink. He asked which of us housemates wanted to help him make a dent in the bottle of whiskey he’d gotten as a present. I was happy to help—I like a good glass of Irish whiskey—and another of the guys who happened to be around sat down with us, too. The bottle was opened, the first glasses consumed, and then the other housemate went out to the pub—leaving me and ground-floor guy to finish the bottle of whiskey.

  Which we did.

  When our housemate got home, he caught us making out on the living room couch. His reaction was to get all mushy and give us both big hugs, which was hilarious and made the whole thing fun instead of weird.

  The next day, as was usual for my commitment-shy self, I backed way away from the situation. Ground-floor guy and I decided to stick to being just friends as we were housemates and didn’t want to make things uncomfortable. And that was that.

  For about two weeks.

  Another weekend night, another bottle of whiskey, and another make-out session confirmed we weren’t going to stop hooking up just because we were living in the same house. In fact, from my perspective, if we hadn’t been housemates, I would have run away (as I was wont to do), and we never would have gotten together again. I can honestly say that I’m married now because the man I married just happened to be my housemate and I couldn’t avoid him.

  It helped that he was really cute and tall and for some reason still found me attractive even when wearing wellies and an oversized coat.

  During my fieldwork, we continued to get together on Friday nights, but we didn’t have our first real date until the fieldwork was over. Fieldwork involved me leaving the house at 5:30 A.M. to be in the park before sunrise and not getting home until usually 7 P.M. or later, depending on the bus schedule. For our first date, he took me to see The Full Monty, a movie about blue-collar workers in England doing a strip show to make money and deciding to do “the full monty,” or taking everything off, to make their show different from any other. The movie was fantastic, funny, poignant, and about ordinary men stripping. I mean, really. Brilliant!