by Karen Kendall

TAKE ME IF YOU CAN is the first book in a series about an agency that recovers stolen art—and other valuable items. ARTemis, Inc. is a Miami-based firm that my heroine, Avy Hunt, co-founded . . . with Kelso, a man whom nobody’s ever met.

It all started with a sword. No, that’s not strictly true. The plot started with a sword. And I’m not a natural born plotter, so actually character came first when my hero strolled onto the page. We’ll get to him in a minute. For now, check out these gorgeous, historical swords.

Why, you ask, are we looking at swords? Well, because in TAKE ME IF YOU CAN, my hero and heroine are both chasing after the historic, multi-million dollar Sword of Alexander. In the beginning, he’s got it, and she wants it. Then she’s got it and he wants it. By the end of the story, they’ve both got it–bad . . . if you know what I mean. LOL.

   

If I had to pitch TAKE ME IF YOU CAN to a Hollywood producer, I’d say that it’s a hybrid of To Catch a Thief, The Thomas Crown Affair (remake) and Alias.

The pace is edgy, the stakes are high and the sex is pretty sizzling! (Or so I’ve been told.)

                 

Ah, Cary! (My husband has a chin                      Pierce. Wicked humor
like his. I think I married him for that                   *and* god-like looks.
chin . . . )

               

Rrrrrowwwr. Chemistry!                          Sydney: great costumes and grace under pressure.

       

A sense of adventure!                                 S-E-X appeal.

Here’s the way I picture Avy Hunt, my heroine. (See photo below.)  She’s kind of a mix between Renee Russo’s character in the Thomas Crown Affair (Catherine Banning) and Jennifer Garner’s character in Alias (Sydney Bristow).

She’s very good at breaking and entering. She considers herself a “repo man” for the art world, contracting with insurance companies to track down and get back missing treasures.

Though Avy’s a southern girl and a Sweet Briar grad (BA History of Art) she’s no fluff-ball. Her most prized possession is a Swiss army knife that she wears on a cord around her neck and she has a history of doing extreme sports with her father, U.S. marshal Everett Hunt. Avy’s an adrenalin junkie and she’s got a reckless edge to her . . . which she can camouflage at will to suit
any circumstances.

Okay, so Avy is a woman whose shoes it would be cool to step into for a while. (Especially the Christian Louboutins, for you shoe junkies out there.)

But what about Sir Liam James, my atrociously sexy, world-renowned cat burglar?

Here’s where the inside story gets interesting. See, Liam was supposed to be the VILLAIN. He was going to be a minor character. But I ask you, if you could make a hot Frankenstein out of the guys below, d’you really think he’d settle for a minor role and maybe a brief butt shot?

Well, he didn’t. Liam took over the page like . . . well, like one of the men below would! As a master-thief, he did his job: to steal the show. How? Like this:

He decided to inhabit David Beckham’s body. He pilfered his looks and suave demeanor from Pierce Brosnan and George Clooney. And then, just to put some extra icing on the man-cake and make himself unique, he adopted some of the eccentric, over-the-top roguishness of Johnny Depp’s character in Pirates of the Caribbean.

        

 

    

(I think they should make George Clooney lollipops, don’t you?)

But I digress . . . which is so easy to do when George is around, looking like
smoking sin itself. This is the kind of reaction Liam gets from women. And Avy’s not immune, not by any means.

Especially when she breaks into the guy’s house to look for the sword and he cooks her dinner—out of professional courtesy, you understand. As a thief, he feels obliged to extend hospitality to anyone who breaks into his house.

And after all, he’s broken into her home, too, and gone through her files en route to her lingerie drawer.                                                    

Black leather gloves. Black cashmere. Diamonds. Vodka. Seduction on an oriental rug in front of a fire . . . these were all the images that came to me first, as I brainstormed the book. A house full of world-class art and furniture, most of it stolen. Sir Liam James, trying to hijack the clothes off a woman’s back.

I sent my strange ramblings off to my agent, who loved them but prodded me into developing a plot. (She’s so demanding that way. LOL.) I came up with something, my editor bought it, and I began to write in a new genre by the seat of my pants. Heh.

Now, when you’re writing by the seat of your pants, it generally means that either the back of your head is bouncing along the ground or your face is dragging in the dirt. In my case I was pretty sure it was both, since my head was spinning.

Me, write a suspense plot? With twists and turns? No, no, no. I was a romantic comedy author. I focused on peculiarities of character. Plot was a four-letter word to me. Still is, in many ways.

But all that head-banging must have jarred something loose, because I started to find that plotting could be great fun!

Then I hit a major speed-bump. I discovered that while the chemistry between Avy and What’s-His-Face, my former hero, was okay, it wasn’t great. It wasn’t what I had envisioned. Nothing explosive.

Why? Well, for one thing Avy and What’s-His-Face (a secret service agent) were both on the right side of the law, so their values were too similar. And for another, What’s-His-Face was just not as interesting as Liam.

Liam said to me one day, after I had written almost 200 pages, “Look, you little control freak of an author, I hate to burst your bubble, but this is MY story. So get that other guy out of the way.”

I said to Liam, “Are you out of your mind? Get back into your character box and behave yourself!”

And that was when he shot his way out with his Glock and pilfered my computer. He sent the whole half a manuscript spinning into the recycling bin. And then he said, “Now. Just start over, there’s a love. Write me the way I’m meant to be written.”

That darned Liam. He’d turned into a manuscript thief as well as an art thief!

       

But he was as deadly serious as Antonio up there. (Nice sword, Antonio. The mask is hot, too.)

So. I tossed the 200 pages and wrote TAKE ME IF YOU CAN the right way, with Liam as the hero—much to Avy’s consternation. She got all hot and bothered about it, because he’s such a hot and bothersome guy.

Liam and Avy duel back and forth over the sword for the entire book. In the end, who’s chasing whom? They go from steamy South Beach in Miami to cool, foggy London to the glamorous south of France. Want a peek at where they stayed there? It’s a gorgeous hotel in Nice called the Palais de la Mediterranee.

The Palais at night. Gorgeous . . .

Don’t you want to check in? Here’s the courtyard, which has an
incredible view straight out to the Mediterranean. Outside, below,
is the Promenade des Anglais, where Liam and Avy stroll.

Yes, the pool flows from the courtyard to inside the hotel! Not
bad, eh?

(On our trip to Nice, we didn’t stay here, but we did eat dinner in
the hotel’s excellent restaurant, just like my characters. )

But back to the story.

Now, here’s the kicker to all this revising of the book. I did not ask my editor what she thought about a change of villain to hero. Nope. And that was a very dangerous game to play, since I could have ended up rewriting the entire manuscript for the 3rd time if she didn’t like it. But I figured that it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission, especially since I felt so strongly by that point that the book had to be written this way.

I was shaking in my size ten shoes until she got back to me. Because, you know, I’d always played by the rules. I’d never done anything so obnoxious as to completely toss an approved synopsis in the middle of a book. I wondered if I’d be told to hand back the advance, that my contract was canceled.

Luckily that didn’t happen! And here I am writing the sequel (working title TAKE ME TWO TIMES) which should come out next spring or summer.

I hope to write many more books in this series! There’s a lot of stolen art out there to recover, and I have just the agents to do it, too. Speaking of that, how would you like to “recover” some “stolen” art yourself? Just enter my April  contest for TAKE ME IF YOU CAN at www.KarenKendall.com and you could win a framed piece of art to brighten up your home or office. You can also read an excerpt of the book and sign up for my newsletter.

Let me know what you think of TAKE ME IF YOU CAN! And have a great year. All best,

Karen