Part of Series
A Cinderella story set in a Philadelphia law firm filled with dark corners and scheming rivals ... Meghan Mattson resigns her summer associate job when she learns that her bipolar mother is a con artist ... using Meghan's name. Meghan convinces the Feds to drop the charges against her, but it ends her career. On Dan Howard's first day as a junior partner, he's amazed his paralegal is Meghan, Franklin Law's star student. He's thrilled to work with such a brilliant mind ... and such an attractive woman. As Dan and Meghan tackle a tricky case, they struggle to resist their mutual attraction. Even if senior partner Wallace Leith approves, others in the firm want to see them fail. Can their office romance bring them a fairy-tale ending? The Cost of Happiness is a stand-alone legal romance. It's also Book Two in Magdalen Braden's Blackjack Quartet, following Love in Reality.
Author
In her series of sexy contemporary romances, The Blackjack Quartet, Magdalen Braden writes about lawyers, judges, law students, paralegals … an entire fictional Philadelphia legal community, in fact. Hey, she left her legal career to return to her first love, romance writing, so it makes sense she'd write about the law. As she puts it, "I needed a day job to quit, so I went to law school." Be glad she doesn't draw on her other professional experiences, which include failed caterer, failed daycare administrator, failed editorial assistant, and failed hearing tester in a flour mill. Magdalen writes about Philadelphia because she went to law school there, practiced there, and even has a British patent attorney ex-husband still living in the Victorian South Philadelphia house Magdalen bought before they married. (The house used to be part of a convent—another aspect of her past that won't show up in her steamy novels.) In a shameless bid for attention, Magdalen has been known to tell people she and bestselling author Julie James have virtually identical legal careers: Magdalen went to a better law school but Julie had the better federal clerkship. In addition to writing, Magdalen keeps busy completing her Masters in Fine Arts degree from Stonecoast, the University of Southern Maine's MFA program, one of only two in the country that acknowledges romance novels exist, let alone comprise a wildly popular fiction genre. She even submitted a scholarly essay on Susan Elizabeth Phillips' "Dream a Little Dream" in her first semester. What time Magdalen has left over is spent with her second British husband (what can she say? She has a type!) in their two-hundred-year-old house in rural Pennsylvania with their cats and dog. Magdalen's debut romance, "Love in Reality", begins The Blackjack Quartet. Book three in the series, "Blackjack & Moonlight", was a 2012 finalist in the prestigious Romance Writers of America Golden Heart® contest and will be published in 2013 after "The Cost of Happiness" (Book Two) and before "Lost and Found" (Book Four). There are rumors she's even considering a fifth book in the series. Figures a former lawyer would try to sell a fifth book as part of a quartet …
