The Villain’s Daughter

Every romance has a villain.

Mine has his daughter.

If you read A Taste of Gold, you’ve already met the kind of man Theresa comes from—the kind who wears refinement like a mask and treats damage as a right. In A Name for Love, I wanted to do something that makes a story feel dangerous from the inside out: I wanted the heroine to be born in the house that did the harm.

Because that’s where the real question lives. Not “can she be loved?” but “can she be believed?” Can she step into a new life without being reduced to the worst thing her family ever did? Can she survive a world that loves bloodlines, surnames, and the comforting lie that goodness is inherited?

Theresa’s childhood is Vienna: polished halls, marble steps, the appearance of safety. It’s also the private education of a girl who learns early that grandeur doesn’t mean gentleness. She grows up watching her father and brother move through society with the sort of protection money and station buy—what she calls, with bitter precision, “the crimes they got away with due to their stations.” And she understands something most people never have to learn: a family name can be a doorway, or it can be a cage. Sometimes it’s both at once.

So when she reaches England, she does the bravest thing she knows how to do.