The Touch of Spice

The first question people ask, when I tell them I write cinnamon roll heroes, is: don’t they get boring?

It’s a fair question. A sweet man with no edges is, on the page, narratively flat. The reader needs something to push against. The romance needs somewhere to land. The hero needs a thing the reader can’t solve for him in chapter two.

The cheap answer, in modern romance, is to give the hero a hidden brooding side — to make him secretly tortured, secretly damaged, secretly a bad boy in a flannel shirt. That move works occasionally. Mostly it makes the hero feel like he’s wearing a costume.

I think there’s a better way. I call it the touch of spice, after the brand tagline, and it’s the thing I’m always trying to put into the kindest man in the room.

What the spice is not

It is not:

• A dark backstory he hasn’t shared
• A temper that snaps in one scene and is never seen again
• A surprising sexual side that contradicts everything else about him
• A “but he’s actually a billionaire” reveal

These all read as tricks. They tell the reader the author was nervous about the hero being sweet, and tried to fix the sweetness by hiding something darker inside him.

What the spice actually is

The spice is the one place the hero will not bend. The line, the principle, the small refusal that makes him unmoving when everything else about him is gentle.

In my own books, the spice tends to be one of three things:

1. He will not be talked out of someone he loves. A daughter. A best friend. A grandfather. A dog. There is one person (or animal) in his life he will choose without hesitation, every time, against whatever the heroine’s plan is. The romance has to figure out how to fit around that, not over it.

2. He will not pretend. He’s patient. He’s kind. He’s slow. But there is a thing he will not say he believes when he doesn’t believe it, and the heroine — at some point in act two — will hit that wall. The wall is the spice.

3. He will not chase. This is the one I love most. The cinnamon roll will not chase. He is here. He will be here tomorrow. He will not run after the heroine when she walks out of the room. The patience that reads as gentleness in the first act reads, in the third act, as steadiness. And that steadiness, when she finally turns around, is unbearable in the best way.

The proportion

The thing about spice is that you don’t need much of it. A pinch. A flash. One scene, maybe two, where the kindest man in the room becomes the most certain man in the room.

The rest of the time, he can be soft. He can be gentle. He can be the one who brought you coffee.

Cinnamon roll with a touch of spice. That’s the recipe. That’s the whole book.