“It was very wrong of me,” she said, lifting her chin. “It shall not happen again.”
“If it will never happen again,” he said, “then let me have a last kiss before we part.”
He thought his outrageous request would cause her to either laugh or shout at him. When she did neither, he put his hand against her soft cheek, then leaned down until his lips touched hers. This time, he kept the kiss soft and chaste. He would not upset her again.
But when she leaned into him, he was lost again in deep, mindless kisses. When they finally broke apart, they stared at each other, breathless.
“I must leave now,” she said, backing away.
He caught her arm. “These things happen between men and women,” he told her, though it had never happened quite like this to him before. “Please, Isobel, you must not feel badly or blame yourself.”
The huge eyes she turned on him told him his words had done nothing to reassure her.
“Come, you will want to put this on,” he said, picking up the simple headdress he saw lying on the ground.
She snatched it from his hands, slammed it on her head, and began shoving hair into it.
“ ’Tis a shame to cover such lovely hair.” Unable to keep his hands from her, he helped push loose strands under the headdress. He let his fingers graze her skin as he worked and tried not to sigh aloud.
“Let me go first to be sure no one is near,” he told her. “Watch for my signal.”
He felt her close behind him as he eased the door open. “I am happy to practice with you whenever you like,” he said as he looked out into the yard. “Sword fighting or kissing.”
He spun around and gave her a quick, hard kiss, looking straight into her open eyes.
THE DISH
Where authors give you the inside scoop!
From the desk of Kate Brady
Dear Reader,
One of the first things people want to know when they find out the nature of the books I write is, “What’s wrong with you?” I confess, for anyone acquainted with Chevy Bankes in ONE SCREAM AWAY (on sale now), it’s a valid question. Here we have a villain with serious mother issues, bizarre sister issues, and a folk song driving him to kill. Forget the fact that he stockpiles screams and travels all the way across the country to obtain the final entry in his collection.
So please, folks, allow me to go on record: I am generally a nice person. I am not prone to violence. I don’t have any deeply buried hatred toward my parents, nor do I have any deeply buried skeletons in my gardens. I have basically healthy relationships with my husband, children, sibling, in-laws, colleagues, friends, and neighbors. To be frank, my life is pretty darn dull.
I love it that way—heaven knows I wouldn’t want to face the type of excitement my characters face on every page. But maybe my basic normalcy is the reason I spin tales about larger-than-life characters. In most cases, they are people I would never want to meet, doing things I would never want to do. (Except for those Sheridan men… I admit it would be nice to meet one of them but, alas, they’re engaged with heroines far more beautiful and exciting than I.) When you write about people who don’t exist, the possibilities for perilous physical exploits and heartrending emotional journeys are infinite, and far more exciting than shopping for groceries or weeding those gardens.
So when I started writing ONE SCREAM AWAY, I knew I wanted three things: (1) a smart villain who would hunt down a heroine in some really creepy way for some really twisted reason, (2) a smart heroine with a secret past too horrific to contemplate and chutzpah from here to the moon, and (3) a smart hero so drop-dead gorgeous and profoundly tortured that you couldn’t help but cheer for him, even when he was being a jerk. Beyond that, I didn’t know much of anything and decided simply to follow the hero, Neil Sheridan, step by step, as he tried to solve a murder. I didn’t know so many innocent people would die before he succeeded, or that he’d unravel the truth about his own tragic past along the way. That’s one of the many joys of writing: discovery!
I hope you’ll enjoy the first of the Sheridan stories as Neil tracks down Chevy Bankes in ONE SCREAM AWAY. And I hope you’ll be inspired to come back for more when his brother Mitch makes his debut in the next book!
Please feel free to visit my Web site at www.katebrady.net [http://www.katebrady.net].
Happy reading,
From the desk of Margaret Mallory
Dear Readers,
While writing KNIGHT OF DESIRE (on sale now), I discovered how much I enjoy writing part of my story from the hero’s perspective. After years of guessing what men are thinking, I found it profoundly satisfying to know what was in my hero’s head and heart. I loved being able to show the reader why William does the things he does. (Men do have their reasons.)
The more surprising thing I learned about myself as a writer is that I like tortured love scenes. The hero and heroine’s misunderstandings and conflicts can be revealed with such high drama in the bedroom. (My parents and children will miss these scenes of wrenching emotion, since I am razorblading them out of their copies.) Of course, the hero and heroine eventually are rewarded for their suffering!
Speaking of heroes and tortured love… Stephen, the younger brother in KNIGHT OF DESIRE, is the hero of my second book, KNIGHT OF PLEASURE (December 2009). Stephen is in Normandy fighting with King Henry (Prince Harry in book one), when he crosses swords (literally) with Isobel, a woman he wants but cannot have. Although we know Stephen has a hero’s heart beneath all that charm, our serious-minded heroine dismisses him as a knight of pleasure.
KNIGHT OF DESIRE is my first published book, so I would dearly love to hear from readers. I hope you will visit me at my Web site, www.Margaret-Mallory.com [http://www.Margaret-Mallory.com]. Readers may be interested in photos I’ve posted there of Alnwick Castle, the Percy stronghold where my hero William grew up, and a wonderful statue of Hotspur, William’s famous half-brother. Hotspur, in full armor on a rearing warhorse, looks exactly as I imagined him.
From the desk of Amanda Scott
Dear Reader,
Bonnie Jenny—or, more properly, Janet, Baroness Easdale of Easdale—the heroine of TAMED BY A LAIRD (on sale now), sprang to life because I wanted to introduce the main characters of my new trilogy and its setting, Dumfriesshire and Galloway, without using the central story. That one will be the second book, SEDUCED BY A ROGUE, which comes out next.
Having based the new trilogy on fourteenth-century events described in an unpublished sixteenth-century manuscript in Broad Scot (a language somewhat like Robert Burns poetry only more indecipherable), I quickly saw that the research would take longer than usual and decided that some issues would be clearer to readers if introduced from more than one perspective. For example, in Scotland, unlike England, if a man had no sons, his eldest daughter became his heir. So a baron’s daughter, even with countless male cousins, could become a baroness in her own right, or an earl’s daughter a countess, with all the powers and privileges of the rank… as Bonnie Jenny does.
Thanks to incessant fourteenth-through-sixteenth-century warfare and raids causing the deaths of thousands of men in the Scottish Borders, women inherited with unnatural frequency. One might think such a lass would be in high demand as a wife, but that generally became true only after she had inherited. You see, until her father had actually died, folks assumed he might still produce a son.
However, Jenny’s father, having refused to remarry after the death of his beloved wife, raised Jenny to understand, as well as he understood them himself, the position and duties she would one day assume. So imagine her shock when he dies while she is still unwed and underage. Then imagine her even greater shock when her guardian (an uncle) and his wife decide to marry her to the wife’s younger brother in order to provide that obnoxious creature with a tidy income and—as they suppose—a fine, ancient title.
Because they have moved Jenny miles from her home in Easdale to their own home in Annandale, she believes she has no choice but to ob
ey them. That attitude, however, lasts only until her betrothal feast. Repulsed by the man to whom they have betrothed her, Jenny escapes with the minstrel troupe hired to entertain their guests.
Her uncle, finding her intended groom incapacitated from far too much whisky at the feast, asks Sir Hugh Douglas, the lad’s older brother, to retrieve Jenny.
Sir Hugh, a knight, experienced warrior, and member in high standing of the all-powerful Douglas clan—and rudely awakened from well-earned sleep—curtly refuses. Because he is also a widower with a large estate of his own to manage, he takes little interest in his brother’s affairs and even less in Jenny’s problems. But, Dunwythie persuades him by appealing to his sense of honor and family duty.
Naturally, being a strong-minded male with considerable ingenuity who rarely changes tack once he has made a decision, Hugh has made up his mind without giving a single thought to Jenny’s feelings. So when she politely but firmly declines his “invitation” to return with him to her uncle’s household, explaining that before she can do so she has a mystery to solve…
Well, let’s just say that TAMED BY A LAIRD pits a powerful, rebellious young baroness against an equally powerful, determined baron and lets the sparks fly wherever they will.
Happy reading and suas Alba!
http://home.att.net/~amandascott/ [http://home.att.net/~amandascott/]
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