I owe my passion for romance writing to various sources of inspiration, from my parents teaching me about the arts to my education in French literature and the many places I have seen and experienced on my travels. But an important inspiration for me was a childhood lost in my imagination.

My governess sparked my love of storytelling, for she told the most amazing tales full of drama and passion and intrigue. She told me she was a widow, her husband having been crushed by a falling horse, which I thought was terribly tragic. My mother was not convinced that all of Zula’s tales were true, but I was entranced. Indeed, the only discipline Zula ever needed to lay down to get my sister and I to behave was threatening not to continue a story – I would burst not knowing the conclusion.

Then my sister Anissa and I befriended two sisters, Colette and Miguèle, who even at our tender years were similarly romantic and we drank in Zula’s stories and added to them those from our own imaginings. We were keen ballet dancers, and at the age of eleven we put together a three-hour show for friends and family. We chose the music, choreographed the dances, and designed the clothes, and it was a great success. It remains one of the best memories of my childhood; how I loved the romance of the ballet.

Then, in my teenage years, disaster struck: my best friends Colette and Miguèle moved away. I was terribly sad. But before they left we agreed to write to each other, and we took that promise very seriously. So commenced years of co-writing stories. We would each start a story – a romance, usually involving film and television stars of the day – and we would stop at a certain point and pass the story on. All our daydreams fuelled by our daily experiences and the cultures in which we were immersed were poured onto the page, and over time we built up a large collection of stories. By this point I was circulating my own romance stories in class at school, to the delight of my classmates and the irritation of the nuns who taught me!

Creating and writing down romance stories, then, has been second nature to me since my early childhood. Once  Colette and Miguèle and Anissa and I gave up our collective story writing, there was a sadness to letting go of this aspect of my childhood. Had I only known then that one day I would write my own books – how excited I would have been!

I owe a lot, therefore, to the dreams and imaginings of four little girls: Les Quatres Rayons de Soleil as we were known (The Four Rays of Sunshine). And as Walt Disney once said, ‘If you can dream it, you can do it.’