Every girl wants to grow up to be a princess, don’t they? I know I had dreams of tiaras and long flowing gowns and a prince charming with whom I’d live happily ever after. But that’s not true for all young women.
Regina “Reggie” Beswick has left her job as a high-powered CPA to help her father’s lifelong friend and his ex-marine buddies restore classic cars. Mike, her friend since childhood, has an unrequited love for Reggie and feels that she has made a terrible career move. But Reggie is living her dream and loving her life. Fate has, however, other things in store for Reggie.
Hessenberg, a small European country, has lost its princess – and a worldwide search is on to find a member of the royal family – without reigning royalty, Hessenberg will lose its status as a sovereign nation. When her true identity comes to light, Tanner Burkhardt, Hessenberg’s minister of culture, is sent to Florida to retrieve her. Tanner’s mission is vital to the survival of his country, but the all-American, car-loving Reggie has no desire to take up a tiara in Europe, and Tanner has his work cut out for him.
You’ll love all the tricks and traps that Tanner tries to convince Reggie to come back with him and take her rightful place. Rachel Hauck, although writing a modern fairy tale, has lots of twists and turns and mystery before we reach the denouement. Sit down with a cup of sweet tea and enjoy. You’ll love it!
Interviewing Rachel at the International Christian Retail Show, I wondered aloud why she chose to write modern fairy tales. She said she’d watched the whole Kate and William romance and wedding – a situation where the common girl won the prince. She wanted to go on a love story journey.
With that as her inspiration, she wrote Once Upon a Prince about a similar situation to that of Prince William and Kate. Her second book in the Royal Wedding series is Princess Ever After which will be followed by How to Catch a Prince. This spring she and two friends released the ebook, Spring Brides Collection, which contains a novella, A March Bride, about what happens to the two protagonists immediately after the end of Once Upon a Prince.
All of her books, she says are romance or “chick lit.” She’s written three books with Sara Evans, the Songbird novels, which she calls Southern soap operas. In addition she has three books in her Lowcountry Romance series along with a couple of standalone novels. The main question she asks herself when she starts writing is, “How will I make it sincere and authentic.”
Rachel has been married for 22 years to a pastor – they were in a youth pastorate for 20 years. They have no children – she says they’re akin to Elkanah and Hannah. She was a journalism major at Ohio State – her father told her she was supposed to be a writer. Instead she worked in the corporate world as a software trainer and project manager for a Fortune 500 company. She and I share a corporate background and really empathized with each other! She doesn’t like florescent lighting and said in her area at the company, she had maintenance turn off the overhead lights – each desk had a desk lamp instead. I love it – I always hated those lights, too.
She’s a member of American Christian Fiction Writers, has been a finalist at the RITAs (Romance Writers of America), a Christy Award finalist, and a Carol Award Winner. She writes books she loves to read – all from her two-story tower at home!