I had been well into the proposal for THE MORNING AFTER, which was released this past August, when it struck me that my heroine, Nikki McClellan, had two sisters with stories of their own. At that time, I knew writing a heroine who healed men by sleeping with them was a stretch, even for Harlequin’s Blaze line, but if I could get Harlequin to accept one of these heroines, why not three?

I think my editor was as surprised as I was when the senior editor gave the project a thumbs-up. Thankfully, she was willing to take a chance and I had the thrill of bringing the stories of the McClellan sisters to life in my SEXUAL HEALING series.

I thought it would be interesting to make the “gift” of sexual healing manifest a little differently in each sister. I had already figured out that in Nikki the gift was so strong that she couldn’t keep a man until morning. She’d sleep with a man, then he’d take off to conquer the world. Her story, book one of the series, started with her learning about her gift and coming to terms with the fact that she sent men running from her bed. To her, her family heritage is more of a curse that she wants nothing to do with. A string of one-night-stands gives her little hope of finding the stable home she has always longed for.

I knew immediately that Tess, the second sister, whose story is told in my September release, SO MANY MEN…, would have the opposite problem. Her gift would take more time to work and her men would stick around long after the loving. We meet Tess’s men, or minions as her sisters call them, before we meet Tess. When we see her at the start of her own book, she has grown frustrated with her life and all her guys. Though Tess embraces her gift without question and steps into her role of sexual healer as though she were born to it, which she was, her story is about discovering who she is beyond a healer, on her own, without all her men.

So, I had one sister who couldn’t keep a man and one who couldn’t get rid of any. Where did that leave Erin, the youngest sister?

I needed to come up with a different way for the gift to manifest. Since I enjoy torturing my characters, I thought it might be great fun to give Erin a Typhoid Mary complex. She’d sleep with a man and he’d become violently ill. She feels like a fraud among her healing relatives. Actually, she has the gift of purging, but she doesn’t discover this until later in her book, FAKING IT, which hit bookstores in October. All Erin wants is to swear off men, run away from her wacky family and live a normal life far from the McClellan lore. Her journey is about accepting who she is and claiming her own place in her not-so-normal family.

…And the Men Who Love Them

My first hero, Nikki’s guy, Dylan Cain, was actually the character who inspired this series. He was loosely based on a real-life tortured hero. I had met a young man who’d grown up with the Roma, or gypsies, saved a young girl from her abusive father by running away with her, fallen in love with her, only to lose her when she died unexpectedly. Though Dylan hardly resembles this young man, I couldn’t get the essence of that tortured hero out of my mind. What better way to heal him than through the powerful love of a woman? How better to entice Nikki into exploring her healing nature, than to introduce her to a man in such emotional torment that he calls to the healer in her? Although, like the young man I’d met, Dylan has loved deeply and lost, with Nikki’s help, he again joins the world of the living.

And whom else would I match with Tess, the most colorful and controversial of my sisters, but Mason Davies, staid doctor and man of practicality? In my continued quest to torture my characters, I gave Mason deep seated abandonment issues, then threw him into the arena with all Tess’s minions, each a reminder of the transient nature of Tess’s relationships. Mason can’t help but broaden his view of the world and come to terms with his issues.

For Erin, I dreamed up Jack Langston. Jack, who has inherited a life-threatening heart condition, is seeking alternative healing methods, since the recommended surgery for his condition has already cost his family the life of his sister. In desperation, he seeks out Erin, having heard the story of the McClellan women’s unusual gift. When he discovers that Erin is in denial of her gift, he doesn’t tell her about his condition. He knows he should go his separate way, but the chemistry is so strong between them, he can’t help falling for her. Only through loving Jack will Erin discover her own special brand of healing.

Read excerpts from Dorie’s SEXUAL HEALING series at www.doriegraham.com.

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