Kristin HardyKristin has been book-crazy her entire life. When her mom would tell her to go to bed, she'd hide in the bathroom just so she could read a few more pages. In the afternoons, she'd play with her dog, Misty, in the backyard and tell her elaborate storis of princesses and Indians, dressing the dog up to play the part.

She grew up in Anaheim, California, home of Disneyland. When she was 12, Kristin started her first novel about a boy growing up with a racehorse. She managed to get only about 10 pages into it, but the seed of ambition was planted. She wrote short stories throughout junior high and high school, and entered college as a creative writing major. Unfortunately, the pressure of writing literary short stories for a weekly college course was far different than writing one story a semester in high school, and that was the end of that.

Shortly after, now as a geology major, Kristin read about category romance in a Sunday supplement and decided to give it a try. Her first effort brought together an aviatrix and a cowboy and had a great scene in which the heroine airlifted a sick ranch owner in the midst of a thunderstorm. Unfortunately, it didn't have much else. A few years later, now as an engineering major, she decided to try again with a book about a lady architectural engineer and the gorgeous owner of a shipping company. This time, she had a cute meeting scene and a great kiss scene, but still no real plot or conflict. She tossed it after three chapters.

The next year, this time as a physics major, she came up with a plot about a firefighter and an engineer. Things were looking good when she thought about plot points and conflict and actually developed a solid story line. A couple of chapters later, though, she moved away to attend grad school in Orlando, Florida, home of Disney World. (Are we seeing a pattern here?) The manuscript moldered in her closet.

After graduation, Kristin worked in Connecticut on the mirrors for a NASA X-ray telescope now orbiting the earth. Writing kept calling to her, though. She quit engineering and moved to New Hampshire to join the editorial staff of an engineering trade magazine. There she met and fell in love with her husband. Suddenly all those romance novels made a heck of a lot more sense.

Plot possibilities followed her when she left the editing job to join a business-to-business dot-com (where she was an on-paper millionaire for a heady 30 seconds). Around that time, a publisher tried to recruit her to launch a print magazine for an engineering society. Driven by the conviction that it was time to finally finish one of those danged books, she took the job and negotiated a four-day workweek that would allow her time to write.

Her ambition coincided with the announcement of the creation of the Harlequin Blaze line. Inspired by a presentation at a writers' conference, she plotted out a Blaze novel on the plane home and wrote the draft of chapter one that night. Ten months later, she typed the words The End and did victory laps around her living room. My Sexiest Mistake sold to Harlequin's Blaze line for publication in June 2002. In 2004, My Sexiest Mistake became a made-for-television movie on the Oxygen network!

Kristin lives in New Hampshire with her husband, also a magazine editor, who is her critique partner, copy editor, web master, and master of her heart. Read More Read Less