I’m over at Delilah Devlin’s blog today — my 18th wedding anniversary — talking about heroes, including my husband. You can read the post over there (which includes an excerpt from Disobedience By Design), or you can read it here, below.

Regina Kammer: My Real-life Book Boyfriend

As romance readers we talk about our “book boyfriends”. These tend to be Alpha Heroes: ruthless, implacable, protective, possessive men who attract with their charisma and buffed-out good looks, who keep us yearning with their potency and skill. I readily admit that my favorite book boyfriend would quite possibly be the very worst actual boyfriend ever.

He is Lord Odo Wraxall, the heroic villain of Lord Wraxall’s Fancy, a historical erotic romance (heavy on the erotic, light on the romance) first issued by the old Black Lace imprint circa 1996. With Odo, the sexy fun and adventure never stop.

We romance readers swoon for our Alpha Hero book boyfriends. Yet, these men are compelling for the very same reasons they can be repelling. Ruthless possessiveness can border on stalkerism. Too much charisma can be creepy or, if spread too thin, impersonal. This is probably why, as a famous romance author once said (please, please someone tell me in the Comments who said this!), while we desire the Alpha, in reality we marry the Beta.

Well, at least, that’s what I did. Eighteen years ago. Today is the anniversary of my wedding to my very own Beta Hero.

My husband is perceptive, understanding, feminist, aesthetically astute, and quite clever, using brains before brawn to tackle a problem. I love all of that about him. It’s what made me fall in love with him and what keeps me in love with him.

And I want all of my heroines to fall in love with someone just like him! A considerate, caring listener with a spark of creativity and intellect and just a bit befuddled that a cute gal likes him—a lot. So I write the Beta Hero.

Of course I also write the Alpha Hero. In fact, my beefy, dominating Roman knight in Delilah Devlin’s upcoming anthology Hot Highlanders and Wild Warriors is pure Alpha! But usually I give my Alphas some Beta tendencies, even if just a touch. In my latest historical erotic romance, Disobedience by Design, I have three heroes: Joseph, a brawny former stevedore, is the most Alpha of the three; Arthur, a gallant earl, has just a touch of Alpha; and Geoffrey, the lanky solicitor, is pure Beta. I love them all! I hope readers will too and will want to claim them as book boyfriends.

Who is your book boyfriend? Is he an Alpha? A Beta? A bit of both?