About Me

Romance Bestselling Author

They call me Lilly, though on the covers of my books, you’ll find the full name: Lillian Hartwell Lockheart. It’s a mouthful, I know, but somehow it feels like a promise, a whisper of the stories I carry within me.

I was born in Miami, in the kind of neighborhood where music floated on the breeze and people argued and laughed in a swirl of languages. My childhood smelled like sea salt, mangoes, and café con leche. The city wasn’t just my home, it was my first love story.

Even as a little girl, I was always watching. Not in a creepy way, but with the wide, quiet eyes of someone who felt everything. I kept notebooks under my bed, cheap, spiral-bound things with glittery covers, filled with the things I saw,  the woman at the bus stop with tears on her cheeks and lipstick too perfect to match her sadness. The old man who brought a wilted rose to the same park bench every Sunday. The kids who kissed behind the library when they thought no one was watching.

I wrote it all down. Their joy. Their longing. Their heartbreak. Sometimes I gave their stories happier endings. Sometimes I let them stay raw.

My parents—God, they loved me so fiercely. My mom said I had a poet’s soul, and my dad swore I came into this world already dreaming. They never told me to be quiet when I scribbled all night or when I asked questions that were too big for my age. They nurtured me like a seedling, never trying to force me into the shape they wanted, but letting me stretch toward the sun on my own.

As I grew older, love became more than something I observed, it became something I lived. My first kiss beneath a banyan tree in Coconut Grove. My first heartbreak, so sharp it left me breathless. And then, the slow, aching realization that love isn’t always soft, it can be wild, unkind, strange, or even fated. That realization made its way into my stories.

Eventually, Miami gave me roots strong enough to let me fly. I began to travel, not just as a tourist, but as a listener, a feeler, a collector of stories. In Marrakesh, I met a woman who wrote poetry in henna on her palms. In Kyoto, I watched lovers meet in silence, their hands brushing like wind through silk. In Dublin, I drank too much whiskey and cried with strangers who had heartbreaks that echoed my own.

Every place gave me a new color for my palette. Every person, a new chord in the symphony of emotion that is love.

And somewhere along the way, writing became more than my passion, it became my devotion. To love. To art. To connection.

Now, when I sit down to write, I don’t just tell stories. I unearth them, from the corners of the world, from the edges of memory, from the dusty journals I’ve carried since I was ten.

So yes, I’m Lillian Hartwell Lockheart. But to those who know me, I’m Lilly, the girl from Miami who once watched the world through a cracked notebook cover, and now writes stories that make people believe in love, in all its twisted, tender, fate-kissed forms.