Welcome Guest Blogger MJ Fredrick!

I’ve always written stories to relax, telling myself stories to go to sleep, telling myself stories on road trips, telling myself stories because I liked having a situation I could manipulate to please me. Sometimes it meant having a movie star fall in love with me—yes, I wrote a lot of Mary Sue heroines. I was able to take mental trips to places I couldn’t afford to go, to have adventures I am not brave enough to have.

Never was writing more of an escape than the summer I started writing Beneath the Surface. I’d ended a terrible school year with the principal from hell. I was ready to give up my teaching certificate if I couldn’t get another job. My grandmother, who I loved with my whole heart, fell and hit her head and was in the hospital that summer. At first everything seemed fine, and she was sent home, but she wouldn’t eat so had to go back into the hospital and eventually into a nursing home and then to hospice.

I spent time every day wherever she was, and I’d come home and write. I wrote about adventure and treasure and lost love reunited. I wrote about pain and sorrow and loss. All the time I wrote, I knew this was the first book of mine my grandmother wouldn’t read, but I wrote, every day, diving into the world of Adrian and Mallory, digging to find their conflict, revealing the love that had only been buried. I could find joy in this world, no matter what bad happened to Adrian and Mallory, I knew they would have a happy ending.

That’s what I tell people who ask me why I love to write and read romance. No matter how bad anything else is, I know I’ll find a happy ending in the pages of a romance.

Here’s the blurb for Beneath the Surface:

In retrospect, perhaps archaeologist Mallory Reeves shouldn’t have delivered the divorce papers to her estranged husband mere weeks before her marriage to another man. She knew seeing Adrian again would stir up memories, but she didn’t expect so many of them to be good, not after the mess they both made three years ago. She also didn’t expect to want to stay at the dig site on the Yucatan Peninsula. But the lure of the ancient ship and, yes, her sexy ex provide more of a draw than the white picket fence she thought she wanted.

Marine archaeologist Adrian Reeves has good reason to trust no one. His former partner—and former best friend—made off with his last archaeological find. And his wife left him, frustrated by his obsession for professional revenge. Now both Mallory and his nemesis have returned, and it can’t be an accident that they’ve turned up in the middle of the most important excavation of his career. Seeing her again unearths old pain—and rekindles never-forgotten desire. Now he has to decide if he can trust Mallory again. More importantly, if he can trust himself with her.

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Thanks, MJ, for guesting here today! I can't wait to read BTS!