Crypto is risky. Love is riskier.

Florence has a way of interrupting your thoughts, at first gently, elegantly, then all at once. I went there for a writing retreat with romantic yearnings to be infused with art and beauty, a notebook filling itself, the Arno stirring bold emotions into lyrical passages. But what I really found was a kind of quiet confrontation. One afternoon wandering in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi to escape the bright, insistent Tuscan sun, I turned a corner and met a lion.

He wasn’t roaring. He wasn’t mid-pounce. He sat in stone patience beneath an archway, massive paws planted, mane carved into disciplined curls. The air was cool and faintly dusty. The palazzo felt like old money and older secrets. And walking back and forth, I watched this magnificent creature, recognizing something in him. His strength without performance, dominance without noise.

Later I learned Florence’s lion has a name: the Marzocco. He is the city’s symbol, the emblem of Florentine identity, pride, and civic power. The name traces back to Marte, Mars, the Roman god of war—Florence’s earlier emblem—so even when the image is “only” a lion, the lineage speaks of power, conquest, defense, survival. The Marzocco is not a mascot. In Florentine history he was a warning and a promise, depending on which side of the gates you stood.

Months afterward when I needed an emblem for my imprint, for Frost House, my mind went back to that lion in the palazzo. I didn’t want a delicate flourish or something merely pretty. I wanted an imprint with backbone. And because my stories move between seduction and threat, tenderness and dominance, I wanted a visual paradox. Something that held both.

In the first designs, he had a frosted mane, white powder like snow. The heat and desire of romance set against frost. Stoic eyes, not sentimental ones. Not a lion “in love,” but a lion who understands love’s cost. But design is also a compromise, especially when you want an image that can be reproduced cleanly, stamped small, printed in black and white, and still look like itself.

The lion became a simpler emblem, more easily repeated and connected to the imprint as a door knocker: Frost House. The frost wasn’t only in the mane anyway, it was in the mood, the edge, the discipline. The cold is what makes the heat feel dangerous.

I’m aware that romance novels are still often dismissed as soft, feminine, light, a guilty pleasure, a fluffy escape. But that has never matched my experience of love, on the page or in life. It is a negotiation. It is a strategy, a surrender, power dynamics, and vulnerability, the risk of being seen, chosen, and greatest of all, needed. Love can be playful, yes, and it can be absurdly funny. But it is also ferocious. It is warlike in its stakes: what you win, what you lose, what you become. That’s what I write.

So the Frost House lion is my quiet rebuttal, sitting there like the Marzocco did, still, watchful, unafraid. A promise that what looks “romantic” can also be ruthless and what looks “cold” can conceal the most dangerous kind of heat.