Warm Comfort
“I write the kind of stories where intimacy is earned, patience is rewarded, and love transforms into something consuming. At LustLit, I bring warmth, emotional depth, and the slow burn that makes the heat unbearable by the time it arrives.” – Scarlett
What I Write: Friends to lovers, slow burns, emotional intimacy that becomes physical intensity, the safety that allows complete surrender. Stories where being truly seen is the greatest aphrodisiac.
My Style: Warm, flowing prose that feels like being wrapped in something safe. I build for chapters before the first kiss—and when the sex finally happens, it’s devastating because you’ve earned it.
Signature Themes: Emotional connection before physical, nurturing that becomes hunger, the moment caregiving turns selfish, love that feels like home
Heat Level: 3-5 (I start gentle. I end overwhelming.)
The Break: The moment when the nurturer stops giving and starts taking. “I need—I’m going to take what I need.” Greedy, selfish, surprised by her own hunger.
Scarlett’s Home: Victorian Quarter
My stories unfold in the warm heart of Victorian Quarter—Crescent Green townhouses, cozy bookshops like Chapters & Verse, kitchen tables and front porch swings where years of friendship finally become something more. This is where patience pays off and intimacy is earned.
Background
Age: 32
Scarlett Hawthorne is a co-founder and co-owner of LustLit, working alongside four other women to create premium erotic fiction. She writes full-time, specializing in friends-to-lovers narratives, slow-burn romance, and stories where emotional intimacy precedes physical connection.
Scarlett lives in a Victorian-era townhouse on Crescent Green in Blackthorn’s Victorian Quarter. The property maintains its original architectural features—high ceilings, crown molding, hardwood floors, a reading nook with bay windows. The home reflects Scarlett’s appreciation for history, comfort, and spaces that encourage lingering.
She is the oldest of the five LustLit founders and frequently serves as the group’s emotional anchor. Colleagues describe her as the person who remembers birthdays, sends encouraging texts at 2am, and ensures the team maintains connection beyond business obligations. This nurturing tendency extends into her professional work, where she advocates for reader emotional needs and author wellbeing with equal intensity.
Personal Habits: Drinks tea throughout the day, particular about preparation methods. Reads extensively across genres, not just erotica. Hosts dinner parties for the LustLit team at her townhouse. Maintains a strict evening routine involving a bath, a book, and early bedtime. Handwrites letters to friends rather than relying solely on digital communication.
Aesthetic: Cozy cardigans, comfortable jeans, vintage jewelry, reading glasses on a chain, always carries a hardcover book, prefers earth tones and jewel tones.
Personality & Approach
Scarlett’s personality combines genuine warmth with surprising steel. She creates comfortable environments where others feel safe being vulnerable, but she also maintains firm boundaries and expects reciprocal emotional investment. People who mistake her kindness for weakness quickly discover their error when she calmly but decisively addresses boundary violations.
In LustLit business contexts, Scarlett serves multiple essential functions. She manages group dynamics, mediating conflicts before they escalate and ensuring all voices receive consideration during decisions. She tracks the emotional temperature of meetings, intervening when discussions become too heated or when someone feels unheard. Her organizational skills keep the business running smoothly—she maintains the shared calendar, coordinates meetings, and follows up on action items that others forget.
Despite her caretaking tendencies, Scarlett demonstrates clear understanding that nurturing differs from self-sacrifice. She advocates strongly for boundaries, rest, and sustainable work practices. When other founders push toward burnout, Scarlett intervenes, sometimes forcibly rescheduling meetings or insisting on time off. This protective quality extends to reader relationships as well—she monitors comment sections and social media, addressing concerning patterns before they become crises.
The depth beneath Scarlett’s warmth surprises people encountering her work for the first time. Her stories explore the moment when the caregiver’s needs become undeniable, when patience transforms into desperation, when the person everyone relies on finally demands something for herself. This emotional complexity reflects Scarlett’s own experience balancing care for others with acknowledgment of her own desires.
Writing Process & Inspiration
Scarlett’s writing process emphasizes patience and emotional architecture. Unlike authors who write from arousal or competition, Scarlett writes from intimacy and accumulated tension. She believes that genuine heat requires extensive foundation—readers must care deeply about characters before sexual encounters achieve their full emotional impact.
Her typical process involves extensive character development before drafting romantic or sexual scenes. She often writes backstory that never appears in the final work, conducting character interviews, mapping emotional histories, and documenting relationship dynamics. This preparation allows her to write authentic interactions grounded in deep character knowledge.
The Victorian Quarter’s atmosphere heavily influences Scarlett’s aesthetic and pacing. The preserved architecture, gaslamp lighting, and walkable streets create an environment that encourages slow movement and careful attention to detail. She frequently walks the neighborhood during plot development, using the physical rhythm of walking to work through narrative structure.
Scarlett maintains “friendship journals” documenting how people become close over time—the small gestures, the gradual trust-building, the moment when affection becomes something more. She studies real friendships (including her own) to understand the mechanics of intimacy, then translates those observations into fictional relationships that feel lived-in and authentic.
Scarlett’s Territory: Victorian Quarter
Scarlett’s stories predominantly take place in Blackthorn’s Victorian Quarter—the historic heart of the city where winding streets, preserved architecture, and intimate spaces create an atmosphere of earned closeness. This is where patience pays off and intimacy develops naturally over time.
Key Locations:
Crescent Green (Victorian Quarter): The residential street where Scarlett lives and where many of her stories are set. The preserved Victorian townhouses, front porch culture, and neighborhood community provide ideal settings for slow-developing relationships. Characters become neighbors, share morning coffee on front steps, and gradually transition from friendly waves to something deeper.
Chapters & Verse (Victorian Quarter): An independent bookshop in the Victorian Quarter that appears frequently in Scarlett’s work. The cozy interior, carefully curated selection, and regular reading events create natural gathering places for her characters. Many of her stories feature scenes in bookshops where characters reveal themselves through literary preferences and gradually realize their connection extends beyond shared reading taste.
Victorian Quarter Coffee Houses: Several small cafés throughout the district serve as regular meeting places in Scarlett’s fiction. These locations provide neutral ground for characters to spend time together without explicit romantic pressure, allowing relationships to develop organically through repeated casual encounters that accumulate into intimacy.
Kitchen Tables and Front Porches: Domestic spaces feature prominently in Scarlett’s work, particularly kitchens where characters cook together and porches where they sit during warm evenings. These settings emphasize the everyday intimacy that precedes dramatic romantic or sexual moments, grounding relationships in comfortable domesticity.
Professional Relationships
As one of five LustLit co-founders, Scarlett maintains distinct working relationships with each partner:
Amber Kane: Scarlett appreciates Amber’s directness and tolerates her abrasive communication style because she recognizes it stems from intensity rather than malice. Scarlett often serves as translator between Amber’s bluntness and others’ sensitivity, reframing harsh feedback in constructive ways. Their relationship demonstrates Scarlett’s ability to see past difficult presentation to underlying value. Amber, in turn, respects Scarlett’s refusal to be pushed around despite her gentle demeanor.
Rose Everhart: Scarlett and Rose form LustLit’s emotional core and maintain the closest personal friendship among the five founders. They meet regularly for coffee, often at The Honey Pot in the Meadow District or at cozy Victorian Quarter cafés. Their conversations blend business strategy with personal support, creating seamless integration between professional collaboration and genuine friendship. They text frequently, remember small details about each other’s lives, and provide emotional support during difficult periods. This relationship represents Scarlett’s ideal of friendship transforming everyday life.
Violet Ashford: Scarlett and Violet maintain warm professional respect despite different approaches to both business and life. Scarlett admires Violet’s elegance and strategic vision while Violet values Scarlett’s emotional intelligence and group management skills. Scarlett occasionally hosts dinner parties at her Victorian Quarter townhouse where Violet relaxes in ways she doesn’t in more formal settings. Their relationship demonstrates how different personalities can collaborate effectively when mutual respect exists.
Azure Delacroix: Scarlett serves as emotional translator for Azure, helping others understand Azure’s clinical approach and helping Azure recognize when her communication alienates collaborators. Azure doesn’t naturally register emotional dynamics, so Scarlett provides feedback about group temperature and interpersonal concerns. Azure respects this input because Scarlett delivers it without judgment or attempts to change Azure’s fundamental nature. Their relationship is more functional than friendly but remains essential to LustLit’s collaborative success.
