Authors: Kate Brady
One Scream Away (44 page)
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
. 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Having based the new trilogy on fourteenth-century events described in an unpublished sixteenth-century manuscript in Broad Scot (a language somewhat like Robert Burns poetry only more indecipherable), I quickly saw that the research would take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 obey 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!
