 Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Adair moved to the United States in her early 20s and settled in San Francisco, where she opened a business as an interior designer.Adair and her husband, David, have two daughters; they keep two standard schnauzers, Max and Chase, who compete nationally in agility trials.A voracious reader, she began to have story ideas of her own and transferred her creative process from interior design to writing novels, writing seventeen full books before her first novel, "The Mercenary", sold to Harlequin for their Temptation line in 1994.