Guest Post with Author Lila Munro and Giveaway

Today I would like to welcome author Lila Munro to the blog. Lila is currently on tour promoting her book Assumed Master. Lila is here today to talk about her inspiration behind the book but before I give the floor over to Lila, lets get to know her a bit.

Lila Munro currently resides on the coast of North Carolina with her husband and their two four-legged kids. She’s a military wife with an empty nest and takes much of her inspiration for her heroes from the marines she’s lived around for the past fifteen years. Coining the term realmantica, she strives to produce quality romance in a realistic setting. Her genre of choice is contemporary romance that spans everything from the sensual to BDSM and ménage. When she’s not writing, she enjoys reading everything she can get her hands on, trips to the museum and aquarium, taking field research trips, and soaking up the sun on the nearby beaches. Her works include The Executive Officer’s Wife, Bound By Trust, Destiny’s Fire, Salvation, Three for Keeps, the Force Recon series, the Slower Lower series, and the Identity series. She’s a member in good standing of RWA and Passionate Ink. Currently she’s working on sequels to several series to be released throughout 2012. And has a brand new line scheduled for winter 2012-13.

Places to find Lila:

| Site | Facebook |

Good morning! And thank you for hosting me today, Danielle. It’s an honor and joy to be here. Nice digs and plenty of eye candy floating around. I like it!

So…inspiration behind Assumed Master. Well, I have to admit, one of the characters from Assumed Identity actually encouraged the writing of this tale. Assumed Master is book four in my Identity Crisis series and is the only first one in the series to directly follow some of the characters forward and is in fact a continuation of book three, Assumed Identity.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Identity Crisis series, it might be helpful to know it was never supposed to be a series at all and was in fact a stand-alone novella in book one, Identity Crisis. I wanted to write something less vanilla than I had been and boy did my muse go hog-wild at the idea and packed everything but the kitchen sink into that little 25K word story. Whew! Happy and content, I thought I was finished. But it would seem that once you start writing in a less than vanilla world, it sort of holds you captive and just plain won’t let go. So, a second set of characters started talking and I came up with the idea of joining them as a series linked not by common characters but by a common theme. Everyone in the series would have some type of identity issue. Book three came along and by golly I figured I was done…

Who said writers have control of their muses and characters? Well, whoever did was wrong. At least concerning my muses. The little vixens ganged up on me and not only broke my rule of threes, but also broke the mold on my no characters would carry over the whole thing was centered on the identity theme.

Dante Larson told me at some point during edits of Assumed Identity he and Julie had more story to tell, which was odd because he wasn’t even her Master or anything more than her friend. Well, he was in love with her, but that was beside the point. What more was there to the story? She married Mason. The End.

Not quite.

He posed a very interesting question. What happens to a slave that has been left adrift by her previous Master? What happens if she’s in fact been willed to another in the event of her Master’s death?

Inspiration in hand, I broke my rule of three and wrote a sequel…Now it would seem the muse isn’t satisfied with four books and book five is in the works, Assumed Calling, due out this summer. Allen is finally getting his turn and Julie and Dante’s predicament is weighing heavy in his decision making concerning one Nicki Cartwright…lollypop lover and thirty years his junior…

Stay tuned and caution…inspiration lurks.

Thank you again for having me over!
~~Lila Munro

We may be born to the lifestyle,

Julie Stevens and Dante Larson always knew their tastes were a bit more eccentric than those of the average person, but acknowledgement of their chosen paths came at different times. While their lives have run parallel for the last twenty years, destiny always came knocking at the wrong time. Julie was a closeted edge player and before Dante could pull her free of her fears, Mason came along and dragged her kicking and screaming from her self-inflicted darkness, leaving Dante wanting. Although Dante’s been in love with Julie since the day he first laid eyes on her, he's happily married to Blake. But the tides are turning.

But Lady Fate dictates how it should be lived…

Still mourning the death of the only Master she’s ever known, Julie finds herself forced to live with the one man she’s been terrified of for years, Dante. While she has to admit something between them feels right, just as many things feel very, very wrong, starting with the fact he’s married to her gay best friend. Before she even has time to sort out her current predicament, another man catches Julie's attention. But after losing her mother, her sister, and her husband, can Julie come to grips with the fact that Keegan McKettrick jumps out of perfectly good helicopters for a living, rescue diving for the Coast Guard? And where exactly does that leave Dante, who knows for sure he needs a woman to complete his unconventional marriage? Quite frankly, he's tired of waiting.

Places to Purchase:

| Amazon | Barnes & Noble | All Romance | 

“Shhhh…Love, it’s okay. I know. I understand. I suspect Mason will have quite a grip on you for quite a while in that respect, and I get it. I wouldn’t expect anything less.” He stood and pulled her to her feet, turned the water off, then moved to the vanity where he retrieved another towel and started squeezing water from her hair with it. “But you need that anchor. Do you understand that? You need to get settled into a routine. It’ll help bring you back center.”

“I know,” Julie whispered.

She didn’t know how this would ever work. Dante wasn’t the emotional Master that Mason had been. He was more a physical Dom and very stringent. That he was being so easy on her right now defied reason. That was almost more confusing than being here to begin with. If anything, she’d have expected Dante to turn her over his knee immediately for back talking and shutting him out.

“Let’s just use Sir for now,” Dante told her, tossing the wet towel onto the hamper. “Yes?”

“Yes,” she said, still clutching the towel around her middle and peering up at their shared reflection in the foggy mirror.

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, Sir.”

Check out the other books in the Identity Crisis series:

Click on cover for more info.

Want to win some goodies from Lila? Check out what's up for grabs.

Up for grabs:

• 1 lucky commenter from the ENTIRE tour will win a $25 Amazon Gift Card

To Enter:

• Please leave a meaningful comment or question for Lila. 
• Please leave your email address along with your comment to be entered. 
• Giveaway ends July 30th.

Good Luck =)