Valentine's Guest Blog: Karenna Colcroft

My Valentine's Romance event continues with erotic romance author Karenna Colcroft!

One lucky commenter on this post will win a Bookworm Bag of goodies from various romance authors and publishers. So post in the comments what you think about love at first sight!

Love At First Sight


“Their eyes met, and she knew he was the one.”

In stories, love at first sight seems like the height of romance. Two strangers meet and instantly know they belong together. Eyes connect across a crowded room, electricity hangs in the air… there are many, many clichés I could use to describe it.

It’s all fiction, right? No one really falls in love the first time they meet someone. Falling in love takes time. You have to get to know the person, learn about their personality and their past. Infatuation or lust, sure, those can happen at first sight. Not love, though.

Are we sure about that, though? I’d have to disagree. One night in May 2008, I went to a barbecue at the home of a friend I’d met through an online chat room on a dating site. I’d been socializing with her and a group from the site for a little over a year, so her house was familiar to me and so were many of the people there. However, I’d almost decided to skip the barbecue. I’d just ended a six-month relationship with someone else I’d met through the chat room, and had just dealt with a guy I’d dated previously who wanted to start things up again. Feeling like I’d been looking for the right thing in the wrong place, I’d decided to give up dating for a while. Since my friend expected close to a hundred people for her barbecue, all of them from the chat room, I wanted to stay home. I’d promised my friend I’d be there, though, so off I went.

For the first hour or so, I wandered around her yard greeting people I knew and introducing myself to people I hadn’t met yet. I even flirted with two or three guy friends who knew me well enough to know it was playful flirting, not a proposition. It was shaping up to be a nice, relaxing night with friends, and I was glad I hadn’t stayed home.

Then I saw him. Tall, brown hair, glasses. He introduced himself. When I looked into his eyes, something clicked. I told him my chat room name, and his face lit up. “I’ve been wanting to meet you!” he exclaimed.

That was it. I couldn’t understand or explain the connection with him, but it was unquestionably there. And even though I’d chosen to give up dating, I knew if I told him I wasn’t interested, I’d lose out on one of the best things that ever happened to me. For his part, a friend told me later that he’d said to her about me, “I don’t know what it is, but she has some kind of aura about her, and I don’t want to let her get away.”

Other people who were at the barbecue that night have said they knew right away that something special existed between me and this guy. I have a picture someone took that night, about half an hour after he and I met, showing us dancing together. The way we’re looking at each other, it’s obviously love.

The day after the barbecue, I tried to convince myself it had just been a one-night thing. That I wouldn’t hear from him again. After all, he lived two hours away from me. Surely he wouldn’t want to get into anything long distance. As I sat at the computer trying to talk myself into believing this, he IMed me. And the following day, he drove those two hours after working a full day so that he could see me again and meet my kids.

After that, nearly every week on his days off, he made the trip to see us. On that first visit, we agreed to date exclusively. Before a month was over, we’d talked about maybe living together someday. And on my birthday, five weeks after we met, he told me he loved me.

We’ve been living together now for seven months, and the wedding is planned for April.

BIO: Karenna Colcroft has been writing since she was five, and started writing erotic romance in 2006. Her most recent release is the novella Deep Down, available through Siren-Bookstrand. To find out more about that book, as well as Karenna’s other writing, please visit her site at www.karennacolcroft.com. Karenna lives in New England with her fiance, two daughters, two cats, and a fish.
Find out more about Karenna at: http://www.karennacolcroft.com