Tamed by a Laird (50 page)
“Pish tush,” Fiona said without a hint of remorse. “I do not understand how anyone can imagine that such a handsome, charming
gentleman can be other than a friend to us.”
“He may be handsome, but he was not charming,” Mairi countered. “He was cheeky and disrespectful, and he behaved as if he
thought he had every right to treat you so. Truly, dearest, you should never respond as you did to such behavior.”
“Well, you are a fine one to speak, after blushing as you did at every word Robert Maxwell said to you.”
“I did no such thing,” Mairi said, devoutly hoping that she spoke the truth. She could not deny that she had responded in
a most unusual way to the man. Even now, his powerful image intruded. Remembering his apparent inability to recall his own
words to her, she nearly smiled. But catching Fiona’s shrewd gaze on her, she added, “If I did, I will not do so again. The
Maxwells and Jardines are no friends of ours, Fiona. That is what we must both remember.”
“I think we should make them our friends,” Fiona said tartly. “Surely, making friends is better than remaining enemies.”
“It is not so much a matter of being enemies,” Mairi reminded her. “Prithee, recall what our father told us, that the difficulties
have accrued over many years’ time, from the days of Annandale’s own Robert the Bruce when the Maxwells and Jardines sided
with his greatest enemy and that of the rest of us here in Annandale.”
“Pooh,” Fiona said. “That’s just history and too long ago to matter to anyone. This is now, Mairi, and Will Jardine is one
of the handsomest men I have ever seen. In troth, you have gone so long without an offer from a single eligible suitor that
I should think you’d welcome the attentions of a man like Robert Maxwell. To be sure, he is old… at least five-and-twenty…
and not nearly as fine-looking a man as Will Jardine, but you are only six years younger, and he
is
handsome. Moreover, you cannot deny that he intrigued you… in some way, at least.”
Mairi could not deny that she had felt a strong attraction to the man, so she did not try. Instead, repressively, she said,
“Robert Maxwell’s brother is the man so clearly abusing the power of his office in his attempt to extort money from the lairds
of Annandale. We are well outside his Dumfries jurisdiction, Fiona. And as your handsome friend Jardine is clearly abetting
them, we have naught to discuss.”
Fiona gave her a speaking look but said nothing further.
Sakes, Mairi thought as the image of Robert Maxwell filled her mind again, but the man had been much too sure of himself in
a place he had no right to be.
Even so, Dunwythie would certainly send him on his way, and after he did, she would never clap eyes on Maxwell again. That
thought, although it failed to cheer her, told her she was quite right in deciding to forget him.
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
.
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 razor-blading 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,
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.