from SRP author Tracy Cooper-Posey:
This post originally appeared during a blog tour for the release of Blood Knot in 2011. It’s been more than a decade, and it’s high time it saw the light of day again—because secret love stories, while rare, still fascinate us.
Unrequited love. That lonely, yearning kind of love that bubbles beneath the surface—secret, often misunderstood, and occasionally tragic. It’s a time-honored theme in romance novels, cropping up in every era, every flavor of storytelling. Sometimes it partners with The Big Misunderstanding, where two people spend chapters talking past each other. Sometimes it’s purer: a quiet, devoted love that expects nothing in return… for years, even.
Victorian authors absolutely adored this. Take William Dobbin in Vanity Fair—he spent eighteen long years trailing after Amelia, hopelessly besotted, while she remained oblivious. Eighteen years. That’s not love, that’s a bloody endurance test.
These days, modern romances don’t usually torture their characters for quite that long. And that’s a good thing. Because if you’ve ever tried writing a convincing secret love in a contemporary setting, you’ll know just how mind-bendingly hard it is to make it feel real.
When I wrote Blood Knot, I didn’t put one, but two secret loves into the mix. (Go big or go home, right?) And I quickly learned why most writers steer clear of the trope now: it’s devilishly tricky to get right.
In today’s world, where assertiveness is prized and self-expression is practically a life skill, the notion of someone being secretly in love and saying absolutely nothing about it feels… off. Unrealistic, even. But for argument’s sake, let’s say such a person exists. Someone who loves another deeply, completely, without ever breathing a word. And for the purposes of this discussion, let’s toss aside love triangles and “he’s married” situations—those are their own kettle of messy fish.
Let’s talk about true secret love. The kind you hide in the dark recesses of your soul. Here’s the problem: how do you keep it secret?
Because real love, the kind that makes your pulse skitter and your heart do the stupid thing in your chest every time they walk into the room—that kind of love leaks. It shows up in your eyes, your voice, your every bloody expression. And if the person you’re in love with doesn’t notice, you can bet your circle of friends will. Secrets like that have a shelf life measured in seconds in this era of oversharing and helpful matchmaking.
And let’s say you’re the best actor on Earth. You manage to fool everyone, even your own mother. Congratulations. You’re now the proud owner of a bottle of champagne-shaken emotion, and you’re keeping the cork screwed on… for how long?
Because here’s the next question: How long can you do that before it breaks you?
Holding onto that much emotion without a release valve? It changes a person. You can’t love like that, silently and fiercely, without eventually burning out, breaking down, or just morphing into someone else entirely.
And then, of course, comes the final kicker: How do you keep that love alive?
Dobbin managed it for eighteen years, but let’s be real: that was a novel. In reality, love that isn’t returned fades, reshapes, twists itself into something else. Fondness, maybe. A dull ache instead of a raging fire. Or it just vanishes altogether, especially when the object of your affection blithely walks through their day without a clue, or a kind word in your direction.
Which brings me back to Blood Knot. I knew I was playing with fire when I tried weaving secret love into a modern paranormal romance. It took serious reflection (and a few caffeine-fueled plot storms) to create believable reasons for my characters—Winter, Sebastian, and Nial—to love in silence. And even more work to ensure they still had backbone and agency by the end of the story.
What I ended up with was a tangle—emotionally, narratively, and otherwise. A blood knot of yearning, secrets, and romantic torment.
Which is why I named the book as I did.
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Tracy Cooper-Posey
SRP Author
