A Touch of Fire is now available!
Hi everyone!
It’s a beautiful Tuesday in June and that means, my newest book A Touch of Fire, has just come out! Here’s more about this steamy contemporary romance:
Megan White should’ve died twenty-five years ago.
Now she appears to have it all—a solid career, a trendy apartment—but she feels like a fraud. A firefighter, Megan has an edge she doesn’t deserve. She doesn’t burn. Torn between her duty and her dreams, Megan is about to escape to the life she always wanted when a handsome soldier marches into her life.
After his dad barely escapes a house fire, Troy Chapman is forced to return home from the army. He finds the life he left behind buried in ashes with a beautiful red-haired firefighter at the center of it all.
Troy has six weeks to set everything straight before he returns to base, but time at home isn’t easy. Haunted by painful childhood memories, he is now fighting to reclaim the little peace he had before Iraq. A dedicated soldier, Troy is committed to returning to the army, but something about Megan makes him want to put down roots in the very place he’s been trying to escape for years.
Megan and Troy burn for each other, but time is ticking until they must go back to their separate lives. With a new danger on the horizon, Megan and Troy must decide what they really want before they lose their chance at love—and possibly their lives.
A steamy contemporary romance, A Touch of Fire is the second book in the Sisters in Sirens series. If you like strong women with secret superpowers and the men who love them, you’ll love Kathryn K. Murphy’s newest page-turning romance. Get your copy today!
This story has been a true labor of love. While I wrote A Touch Of Healing in a month, this story took every bit of two years. Despite navigating incredibly challenging times where nothing but change seemed constant, I wanted to do this story justice and give the theme of anxiety the attention it deserved. I ended up throwing away thirty thousand words, and restarting completely, to push beyond the stereotypes we see in TV, movies, and other books and explore the true multi-faceted nature of characters whose lives have been shaped through a spectrum of events outside of their control. Anxiety, like all human emotions, can present in different ways, as I wanted to show through Megan and Troy, who both work through their challenges in their own way and are better for it.
As with every book I write, I always like to lend a personal story to one of the characters and in A Touch of Fire, Megan’s music box is from my life. Ever since I can remember, my childhood bedroom had music boxes. Several were gifts given to my mom, but as I child I simply accepted their presence without question, but there was one, in particular, I always loved. This Lucite jewelry box in the shape of a heart is a music box that plays on cue when the lid is opened. I never thought to ask my mom much about it, but vaguely knew it was a gift to her from her father, my grandfather. As those of you who have followed this blog since then may know, he passed away in July of 2020, right when I was writing this story. You can read more about his story here. While visiting family after the funeral, my grandmother showed me a music box my mother had given to him years ago and to my delight, it played the same beautiful song as the one in my bedroom. Apparently, my mom and her dad enjoyed trading music boxes that played this tune. I smiled at the synchronicity and didn’t think to ask or research it until I was watching Andrew Lloyd Webber’s live stream a few weeks later when he opened up the piano and played “Memory.” For once in my life, I was speechless as it all came together. It was then I was reminded of my grandfather’s stories about seeing Cats in London, feeling very out of place. As someone who had to build his life from a house without electricity, he never thought he’d been one to enjoy Broadway but fell in love with the show and the song. Here is a video of my music box that is quite literally a memory from my childhood.
It is amazing what lingers in our memories and echoes throughout our lives.
Thank you for following me on this journey and happy publication day to A Touch of Fire!
🧡 Kathryn