about | excerpt | code name | praise
Lady Kathleen Carhart has everything she could want: generous pin-money, a fulfilling life of charity, and a husband who lives six thousand miles away. But then her husband returns. Ned Carhart returned to help his best friend find his wife, who has disappeared. And now he’s inquiring into the carefully-guarded secrets Kate has kept. Ned is as determined to understand Kate as he is to discover the whereabouts of the missing woman. And that is the least convenient part of their marriage, as Kate is the one who stole her away in the first place.
So far, nobody likes this book. Then again, nobody’s had the opportunity to like it yet, so maybe this is unsurprising.
All of my books get code names while I am writing them. Trial by Desire was code-named Dragon Slayer from the very beginning. Originally, it was because the book was about slaying a particular dragon. But, as it turns out, the name became rather tongue-in-cheek, as the book went on:
“In the stories,” he said, his voice a dark rasp against her skin, “in the stories, the heroine always slays the dragon and lops off his head. The villagers rejoice and build a bonfire, and darkness never again falls on the land.”
She could feel his hands at her side, warm and powerful against the heat of her skin.
“But those,” Ned continued, “are only fairy stories. In reality...”
He smiled at her in the mirror, a lopsided smile. There was something faintly wicked about that expression, as if he were about to impart to her a great secret, one that had been closely-guarded by a centuries-old society. She swayed unwittingly against him.
“In reality,” he whispered, “the dragons never die, and the big sword-wielding buffoons in unwieldy armor cannot slay them. Real heroes tame their dragons.”
