I’ve never really had a thing for blond men. I tend to go for the tall, dark and handsome type, from the suaveness of Cary Grant to the sheer muscular masculinity of Joe Manganiello, taking in Karl Urban, Rock Hudson and Jason Momoa on the way. Jamie Dornan has to have the beard, as does Henry Cavill. Kit Harrington has to have those curls.

There are exceptions, of course. Chris Pine is naturally dark but I only find him attractive when they make him blond for Star Trek. Ditto Chris Evans as Captain America. I’m pretty sure that Chris Hemsworth would be attractive no matter what the hair colour, but he’s very pretty to look at as a blond.

Perhaps I have a blond Chris thing? I don’t know. The problem is, my preference for dark haired men bleeds into my work. I have a natural default setting when describing my heroes, and they basically are a variation on this –

I’m trying to get better with every book I write, and I realise that this is an issue for me, so I’ve deliberately written blond heroes in A Captain For Christmas and my upcoming and as yet unfinished third book in the Ruttingdon Series. I’ve tried to challenge myself to make these blond men attractive to me – if I find them sexy, my readers should, right?

If only I could find images for my covers for them…

You’d think that there’d be a few blond male models for romance novel covers, right? Some? A handful? One?

Not on the sites I’ve been looking at. There are hundreds of brunet models. There are one or two with chestnut or red hair. There was one in a stunningly awful blond wig, but no natural blonds at all.

It’s too late to go back and change the hair colour of my hero in Ruttingdon 3. He has a cameo in the second book, Annabelle’s Awakening, and he’s blond there. That book is due to be published in a week, so that can’t be changed. I’m stuck with a blond Duke of Buckingham whether I like it or not. The cover of A Captain For Christmas has a  dark haired model as the fantastic cover artist at Blushing Books obviously couldn’t find a blond man either.

Where did all the blond men go? Is this why so many romance novels have covers with a man with no head at all? They can’t find any blonds, so they decapitate them?

Blond models of the world! You are needed! Otherwise I’m just going to go back making all my heroes look something like this –

Or this.

Or this.

Actually, what the hell am I complaining about?