The Story Behind Protecting Her Own
By Margaret Daley
When I started thinking of writing a new series for Love Inspired Suspense, I decided I wanted to highlight women who had to be strong–both physically and emotionally because of what they dealt with in their job. There are a lot of jobs that require a woman to be strong, but I wanted something a little different.
I wondered what it would be like to have to be responsible for protecting a person. How would the woman deal with being the person who had to be the expert in security and keeping someone safe? We so often think of men in the position of being a bodyguard. I had to put myself in the role of a female bodyguard. How would a woman think? What would she do? Would she act differently than a male in the same job? Why would someone hire a woman to protect a person?
In this series I show several scenarios. Often the female bodyguard is hired to protect a woman or a child. But the main thing I wanted to show was they were capable of doing the job both physically and emotionally. They brought something a little different to the job. They dealt with issues a little differently than perhaps a male might have in the same situation.
Dealing with the emotional aspect of what is going on is often different for a woman in that job. Generally women are more emotional. We look at life differently than a man. We can try to stamp out our emotional side and sometimes succeed but it’s there underneath demanding a release, often when we least expect it. That is always fun to write about as a writer.
As I wrote this series, creating strong women also made me have to create a male character who could keep up with the heroine. What I had to come up with was not only strong women but strong men, but then that was needed to deal with all the intrigue and danger I threw at them.