Guest post written by The Sugar Maple Inn author Laura Bloom
Laura Bloom is a British romance author bringing a fresh voice to steamy, small-town love stories with a cozy-kink twist. She writes swoon-worthy romances filled with heart, heat, and the kind of grumpy-sunshine banter and autumnal charm readers love. When she’s not dreaming up lakeside inns and cherry-blossom boathouses, she’s wrangling construction jargon as a PR specialist—and wrangling family life at home in the UK with her husband and daughter.
For The Sugar Maple Inn, I swapped billionaire hottie Reese Spencer’s boardrooms for base camps. Then I gave him one big problem: a woman who couldn’t care less about his bank balance.
I LOVE a billionaire romance. There’s something irresistible about a hero who operates on a bigger scale.
So when I started thinking about Reese Spencer, the hero of my new small-town romance The Sugar Maple Inn, I knew I wanted to keep all the things I enjoy about the billionaire romance trope. But I also wanted to have some fun with it.
Swapping the boardroom for the wilderness
I wanted to make Reese a little different from the other billionaires I’d read in romances. So I decided to make him Canadian, rugged and happiest outdoors.
More importantly, I started thinking about what having that much money would actually mean to him. For Reese, wealth means freedom. He can go wherever he wants. He doesn’t even have a permanent home. He can spend his time traveling and pursuing the things he cares about, particularly wildlife and conservation, rather than sitting at the top of a corporation simply making more money.
So when he sets his sights on the Maple Inn, an old inn on an island in the middle of Solace Lake, he doesn’t want to turn it into some flashy billionaire playground. He imagines a wildlife retreat with fishing, birdwatching and nature trails.
(There’s another, more personal reason he wants that particular island too. But I won’t spoil that here).
A self-made billionaire who remembers having nothing
There was another side of Reese that became important as I wrote him: he didn’t grow up with money. His mum worked in care and Reese remembers very clearly what it was like being the poor kid. He also remembers the people who made sure he knew his place because of it. I really wanted to create that that tension in him. He now inhabits this extraordinary billionaire world, but he hasn’t forgotten what life looked like from the other side. In fact, some of the attitudes he encounters among wealthy people make him deeply uncomfortable.
What happens when a billionaire meets the one woman he can’t impress?
Readers of The Cherry Blossom Boathouse will already know Grace, with her pink-tipped hair, Dr Martens and tendency to say exactly what she thinks… sometimes softened with coffee and cinnamon rolls.
She’s a single mom who has spent years working in her mom’s café and is finally ready to build something of her own. Unfortunately, the thing she wants is the Sugar Maple Inn. The same Sugar Maple Inn Reese wants.
Now, obviously, this presents a slight problem when one of you is a billionaire. Reese could outbid Grace without blinking. She’s looking at pouring her savings into the place and taking out a loan that terrifies her. Financially, this should be the least evenly matched rivalry imaginable.
Except Grace refuses to see it that way. She’s not dazzled by Reese’s money. She’s certainly not going to step aside and let him have the inn simply because he can afford to pay more for it.
And Reese, rather inconveniently, starts to admire her for it.
This was where the billionaire romance trope became really interesting to me. Because yes, Reese can buy things. Lots of things. But I didn’t want money to solve the things that actually mattered in the story.
He can afford the Maple Inn, but buying it isn’t as straightforward as writing a cheque. He has Grace to contend with, not to mention the people who own it and the wider Solace Springs community.
What if the woman falls for the man before she knows he’s the billionaire?
One of my favorite parts of Reese and Grace’s relationship is that they actually meet before they meet.
Grace has been chatting on Reddit to someone called WildTrailGuide, who originally helps her with the business side of her plans for the inn. I’ve always loved the You’ve Got Mail appeal of an online romance and secret identity trope, but it felt particularly right for a billionaire romance because it allowed Grace to meet Reese without his money getting there first.
Online, he isn’t Reese Spencer, billionaire. He’s just a man Grace likes talking to. She gets to know his humor, his thoughts, his past. Meanwhile, in real life, she thinks he’s an infuriating billionaire who’s trying to steal her inn.
Taking the billionaire out of his natural habitat
Naturally, once I’d created a billionaire who’d spent years leading expeditions in remote corners of the world, I had to strand him somewhere.
So when an autumn storm traps Reese and Grace overnight on Maple Island, Reese should be completely in his element. Unfortunately, surviving the wilderness is a lot easier than ignoring the woman he’s secretly falling for…. especially when they’re stuck in the honeymoon suite with only one bed.
And that, really, was the fun of writing Reese: keeping everything I love about a billionaire romance hero, then putting him in situations where all his money, confidence and experience can’t help him. Because Grace doesn’t want his billions. She just might want him.
If you like your billionaire romances with a little less boardroom and a lot more autumn, The Sugar Maple Inn has rivals-to-lovers, secret identities, an online romance, forced proximity, one bed, small-town cosiness and a rugged billionaire who is about to discover there are some things money really can’t buy.
