I’ve never been particularly interested in writing attraction where two people have nothing to say to each other.

They can be spectacularly good-looking. They can have sex that damages the furniture. But eventually they have to get dressed, and then what?

That part interests me.

CJ and Chase were always going to have strong physical chemistry, but when I started writing them, I realised very quickly that the thing keeping them together on the page wasn’t simply attraction. They liked talking to each other.

And I don’t mean the kind of dialogue where every sentence is constructed to be flirtatious.

Real conversations don’t work like that.

They wander.

You start with music and somehow end up talking about politics. Somebody mentions a place they’ve travelled to and twenty minutes later you’re arguing about whether you’d rather live there or simply visit. One person says something the other disagrees with and, instead of politely changing the subject, they want to know why.

That’s where I find chemistry.

It is incredibly attractive to meet somebody who makes you curious.

Not somebody who agrees with everything you say. I can’t imagine anything more exhausting than spending the rest of my life with a person whose principal contribution to conversation is confirming that I’m right.

CJ certainly wouldn’t enjoy it.

She’s intelligent and she knows she is. She doesn’t hide it or soften it to make herself easier company. She has opinions, she asks questions and she is perfectly comfortable disagreeing with somebody she likes.

Chase can handle that.

More importantly, he enjoys it.

That was essential.

If I was going to put a man beside CJ, he couldn’t merely tolerate her intelligence because he fancied her. He had to genuinely like the way her mind worked.

There is a difference.

A man can tell a woman she’s brilliant and still spend the entire relationship trying to be the cleverest person in the room.

Chase doesn’t need that.

He has his own intelligence, his own knowledge, his own experience. He doesn’t lose anything when CJ knows something he doesn’t. He can ask her a question without feeling diminished by the fact that she has the answer.

And she can do the same with him.

That creates equality without requiring sameness.

They don’t need identical opinions. They don’t need identical interests. They certainly don’t need to agree about everything.

They need to be interested in what the other person has to say.

I think that gets overlooked when we talk about chemistry.

We tend to describe attraction visually. The eyes. The mouth. The body. The way somebody walks into a room.

Of course those things matter. Physical attraction is immediate and wonderfully uncomplicated until people start talking.

Then the interesting part begins.

Because somebody can become considerably more attractive over the course of a conversation.

They can also become considerably less so.

Most of us have experienced both.

There is the person you notice across the room and stop noticing ten minutes after they open their mouth.

And then there is the person who becomes more interesting the longer you sit beside them.

Something happens when you realise somebody is genuinely listening.

Not waiting for their turn.

Listening.

They remember something you said half an hour ago and bring it back into the conversation. They notice when you’ve avoided answering something. They understand the joke you almost didn’t make. They challenge an opinion rather than politely letting it pass.

That kind of attention is intimate long before anybody touches anybody.

It was particularly important for CJ because she is accustomed to being listened to for other reasons.

Professional success changes the dynamics of a room. If you’re the person with authority, people pay attention. They laugh more readily. They hesitate before disagreeing. They may be genuinely interested in what you have to say, but there is always the possibility that the position is doing some of the work for you.

That isn’t the same as somebody simply finding your mind interesting.

Chase has his own version of that problem.

He has spent enough of his life around successful people to understand that status affects behaviour. He doesn’t need another person impressed by the obvious things.

What becomes far more interesting is being liked without having to present the résumé first.

That gives conversation a different quality.

You can’t rely on the impressive facts.

You have to be interesting yourself.

I loved writing that between them.

CJ can be irreverent. Chase can be dry. They can move between serious subjects and complete nonsense without the conversation feeling as though it has changed category.

Because that’s how people actually talk when they click.

You don’t sit opposite somebody thinking, We have now completed the intellectually stimulating section of the evening. Perhaps we should move into flirtation.

It all overlaps.

A disagreement can be flirtatious.

A stupid joke can reveal more about somebody than a carefully chosen serious answer.

A question can become unexpectedly personal.

And sometimes the most intimate thing somebody can say is nothing extraordinary at all. It’s simply the right response at exactly the right moment, because it tells you they understood what you meant rather than merely what you said.

That is the kind of connection I wanted between CJ and Chase.

The physical attraction is there. It would be rather dishonest to pretend otherwise.

But I wanted the reader to understand why they would still want to be in the same room once the immediate attraction had somewhere to go.

Why they would keep talking.

Why one conversation would lead naturally to another.

Why something one of them said would stay in the other’s head afterwards.

Because that is when another person begins to occupy space in your life without permission.

You hear something and think of them.

You find yourself wanting their opinion.

Something happens during the day and you know exactly how they would react to it.

You begin having conversations with them when they aren’t actually there.

By then, attraction has become something else.

And that is much harder to walk away from.

I didn’t want CJ and Chase to fall for each other because the plot required them to. I wanted to be able to put them somewhere with nothing dramatic happening and still believe they would choose to sit beside each other.

Take away the clothes, the money, the beautiful places and everything else a romance novel can use to create atmosphere.

Would these two still have something to say?

For me, they had to.

Otherwise I didn’t believe the rest of it.

And if I didn’t believe them, I couldn’t reasonably expect anybody reading No Names, No Titles to believe them either.