Abby Gaines wrote her first romance novel while still in her teens, longhand in school notebooks. When she’d finished, she typed up the manuscript and sent it to Mills & Boon in London. Incredibly, they rejected it....
No trace remains of that original work, and Abby shelved her writing dreams while she studied French, Japanese, German and Spanish for her B.A.—obviously she was worried there weren’t enough words in the English language to keep her amused. She also struggled through one paper in Economics, by far the most foreign language of them all.
After she graduated, Abby worked for IBM, where she met her husband. It wasn’t until after she had children and was working as a freelance business journalist that Abby’s ambition to write romance resurfaced.
Over the next few years, she submitted several manuscripts to Harlequin, all the while attending romance writing classes and conferences, and reading every how-to book she could find. When it became clear romance writing wasn’t going to make her an instant millionaire, or indeed any kind of millionaire, she took on the part-time role of editor of a speedway magazine—about as far removed from business journalism and romance writing as can be. But the job turned out to be a lot of fun, and Abby became just as passionate about the sport as any longtime fan.
After five years of submitting to Harlequin, Abby sold her first book to Superromance in April 2006—and a month later, she sold to Harlequin’s NASCAR series
