In 1997, Patricia Rosemoor went to Cook County Jail. She says she’ll never forget the 12-foot fences topped with razor wire, the sniper towers, the metal detectors, the long lines of people waiting to be processed, and the din of the inmates in the two-story cell blocks. “It left me with the impression I would never want to be there as an inmate in my entire life.”
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Research for 53 novels has taken her to the banks of the Chicago River, to the sleep clinic at Rush-Presbyterian-Saint Luke’s Medical Center, and to neighborhoods like Wicker Park and Ravenswood Manor, but as Rosemoor says, “The big city is not necessarily what readers want. I prefer to write about different settings.”
During most of the 80s Rosemoor–which is a pen name–worked as a television production supervisor at Harper College and wrote romances on the side. By 1987 she had written five and received the Romance Writers of America Golden Heart Award for best young-adult novel by an unpublished author. She had signed a contract with Dell, but she was still wary of losing the security of a full-time job with benefits. “I kept asking for something like a short-term leave of absence, then a long-term, or an assurance that I could have my job back. They cut the strings completely.”
The bedside lamp was on the lowest setting. Expecting Flint would be naked under the covers, Nicky was relieved to find him dressed in a T-shirt and the pants he’d been wearing when she’d bailed him out of jail. Even so, tying him up was no impersonal task. She had to sit on the edge of the bed, her hip touching his, and try to ignore the sensual images that immediately crowded her mind.
