Penny Jordan Presents the Sicilian Leopardi Brothers

Author Penny Jordan brings us an extraordinary post today about the three heroes in her latest trilogy, The Leopardi Brothers. The first book, Captive At The Sicilian Billionaire’s Command about the youngest Leopardi Brother, Rocco, is on sale now online and in stores in North America. Read on to find out how Sicilian culture, birth order, and more inspired these three dramatic, alpha-hero driven stories…

by Penny Jordan

The three books I have written about the Leopardi brothers have to be amongst my own all time favourites, and yet initially I wasn’t sure I could write them. What did I know about Sicily or about the emotions that might hold three alpha brothers together or keep them apart?

As always when I write I needed a strong underlying structure that would support the mindset of my heroes and I found that structure in Sicily itself. During a short visit to the island my research showed me the powerful loyalty to family and culture, handed down through the generations, that exists there.

I wanted to create three alpha heroes, all of them equally independent and equally alpha, but how would that work in a family set up? How would the traditional Sicilian mindset of complete loyalty to and reverence for the head of the family sit with such independence?

My answer to these questions was to have my brothers give their loyalty to their family name rather than to an individual. Each of them was able to take charge of their own empowerment whilst respecting their inbuilt instinct to put loyalty and duty above the needs of their own ego.

When the brothers concerned belong to a proud aristocratic family then the loyalty they receive from their ‘people’ goes hand in hand with their sense of duty toward those people – in fact to all those who they see it as their duty to protect – and the mix takes on an intriguing potential for conflict.

Add into this mix a distant, cruel father whose unkindness forced my heroes, when young, to turn to one another for support; a dead half-brother whose lifestyle filled them with contempt; and an urgent need to find, and ultimately protect from their own father, the child that their half brother might have fathered, and I felt I had the beginnings of ‘something’ that could work.

The island, its history, its people and their culture gave me the framework that created the brothers’ attitude to life. Their lack of parental love as children forged such strong bonds between them that I wanted to reinforce their sense of duty to their name and to one another whilst establishing a credible reason why they should feel so strongly about finding and protecting a child who shared their blood.

I was nearly there – and my own experience of the effect differing sibling positions have on the way we develop, added the final element to the mix.

My first hero – the youngest of the three – would be creative, independent, and unafraid of taking risks and being open to the outside world (my own younger sister is like that – younger children can be more adventurous). Additionally though, the first hero carried the burden of feeling that his mother, having given birth to him, had chosen to die rather than to fight for life. This influenced his own emotional development, giving his character certain deep and complex barriers to personal happiness. As a Leopardi he believed that it was his duty to help find his hated half-brother’s child, but as a man he finds that the woman he believes is that child’s mother compels from him a love that goes against the demands of his Leopardi name. He must choose between duty and love. Rocco Leopardi is gorgeous – my take on a traditional alpha hero with a modern outlook, who can’t help but respond to the needs and the vulnerability of the heroine. His strength protects and shelters her, his confidence inspires her, and his love for her heals all her emotional wounds. Rocco Leopardi stands tall as an alpha hero, even whilst he’s cradling a baby in one arm and protecting the woman he loves with the other. This is a man who has the strength to put love first.

The second brother is a classical ‘middle child’ and to add to the turbulence of this emotional mix I created for him a heroine who is also a middle child. They share a fierce determination to prove to the world that being a second child does not make them second best, that they can be ‘better’ than the first born. As a couple they both automatically understand what drives the other, they know all about loving an elder sibling and yet at the same time hating being subservient to a first-born. They know about creating challenges for themselves, targets, goals, barriers to their own happiness in what they are.

I loved the emotional intensity of this book; the way my hero is torn between his sense of not being as good as his elder brother and the resentment that causes him, whilst at the same time loving him deeply.

This couple are so well suited for one another in their shared passion, and strength and vulnerability. Together they can teach one another how to be free of their childhood unhappiness.

I just love this book, and this couple. My heroine is so proud and yet so vulnerable, a girl growing up in an all male household who has never really been able to be ‘feminine’ – everything at first sight that Alessandro Leopardi most dislikes in a woman, and yet…heart to heart, birth position to birth position he recognises something within her that touches his own emotions no matter how much he wants to reject that knowledge. He knows how she feels and how she thinks, he knows what she hungers for and he knows that more than anything else he wants her to hunger for him.

The third book relates to the love story of the eldest brother – Falcon Leopardi. A first born of three, an eldest child through and through who has always taken his responsibilities seriously and for Falcon there is no greater responsibility as a Leopardi than that of righting all that his father has done wrong, and protecting the innocent, especially when that innocent shares his own blood.

Falcon knows what it is to be rejected and unloved. As a boy he tried his best to protect his brothers, to give them the love and security their parents did not, but he was only a boy himself then and he feels that there were many times when he failed them. He will not fail this innocent life, this child conceived in the most brutal of circumstances — nor its mother. He will find a way to make amends. He will re write the failures of his earlier struggles to ‘make things right’ for his brothers and he will restore all that has been taken from her. Only Falcon has not taken into account that his personal feelings will get in the way of his commitment to his self imposed duty. Who can he turn to for help and advice? Only those who know him best can help him now. Even the most alpha of men sometimes has to ask for help. Even the eldest child sometimes needs the love and understanding of its siblings.

Falcon for me is all that I myself would want to find in an alpha man.

I have enjoyed writing these three books far more than I thought I would at the outset. I’ve tried within them to give a flavour of the ‘old’ Sicily and its people’s pride and courage; so many different peoples have influenced the island, and its history, and I hope you will find a flavour of this within these books.

As for the Leopardi brothers – I wish there were more of them for me to write about.

Penny Jordan

Note: The second book, The Sicilian Boss’s Mistress, comes out in May but is available now on eHarlequin.com and eBooks.eHarlequin.com! The third book, The Sicilian’s Baby Bargain, will be out in June.

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