I always intended to follow The Lady and the Pirate with a story about Katherine’s sister, Faith. But The Lady and the Pirate II ended up being a very different beast to what I had in my head at the start. In early drafts there was a strong BDSM slant, with Samael in quite an evil “slave trainer” role (eventually finding redemption through Faith). I still think there’s a good story to be written along those lines, but it seemed too dark to do as The Lady and the Pirate II, given that The Lady and the Pirate was fairly light, so I heavily rewrote it and I think it was the right decision.

I wrote a large chunk that duplicated the beginning of the first book, showing Katherine and Faith on board the Worthington from Faith’s point of view. It worked, but I decided to cut it to get to the meeting with Samael more quickly. I think I chopped something like 5,000 words in the end.

I’d originally planned to write this one as dual POV, as in The Lady and the Pirate. But while that worked with Mullen as a hero, I wanted to keep Samael as much more of a mystery, so I stuck to Faith’s POV.

My favorite scene in this one is probably the bath scene. I know it’s completely impractical and I’d probably get sick of carrying buckets of hot water around in about five minutes flat, but I want and old-fashioned bathtub like the one in this scene 🙂