Louise Allen wrote her first historical novel, a tale of knights and damsels in the local castle, at the age of eight - and then life intervened.  When she picked up a pen again it was for Harlequin Mills & Boon and she now has more than twenty five novels and novellas published.  All but two have been Regencies - it seems there is something irresistible about a rake, both for readers and authors.

Louise lives in the English county of Bedfordshire, with a bolthole on the coast in Norfolk where the skies are huge and the wind comes straight from Siberia. Her long-suffering husband cooks (too well) and genuinely seems to enjoy being dragged around the streets of London in search of the location of Gentleman Jackson’s Boxing Saloon or Lord Byron’s lodgings.  He even tolerates a collection of over five hundred Regency fashion prints escaping over every flat surface.

After years as a librarian, and then a property manager, Louise is thrilled with her recent escape into full-time authorship but it doesn’t seem to make the characters any easier to control.  She starts off with plans and lists, charts and pictures - and then the characters take over.  But she consoles herself with the thought that it is their love story, after all.