About this item
New York Times bestselling author Monica McCarty continues her Highland Guard series in this eleventh steamy historical romance set against the sweeping backdrop of the Scottish Highlands.The first time he caught sight of Elizabeth Douglas, Thomas MacGowan thought she was a princess. To the son of the castle blacksmith, the daughter of the powerful Lord of Douglas might as well be. When it becomes clear that his childhood companion will never see him as a man she could love, Thom joins Edward Bruce's army as a man-at-arms to try to change his lot. If he's harbored a secret hope that he could close the gap between them, he faces the cold, hard truth when Elizabeth comes to him for help. She might need the boy who used to climb cliffs to rescue her brother from the hands of the English, but she would never see the son of a smith as a man worthy of her hand.
About the Author
What do you get when you mix a legal career, a baseball career, motherhood, and a love of history with a voracious reader? In my case, a Historical Romance Author. Like most writers, I've always loved to read. Growing up in California there was always plenty to do outside, but all too often I could be found inside curled up with a book (or two or three) . I started with the usual fare: The Little House on the Prairie series, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, Watership Down, Nancy Drew, and everything by Judy Blume. Once I cleared off my bookshelf, I started swiping books from my mom. Some, like Sidney Sheldon's The Other Side of Midnight, probably weren't the most appropriate choice for a pre-adolescent - although they were definitely illuminating. I can still remember the look of abject horror on my mom's Catholic-girl-face when I asked her what a virgin was. After that rather brief conversation, she paid a little closer attention to what had disappeared off her book shelf, and steered me in the direction of Harlequin and Barbara Cartland romances. I was hooked. I quickly read through the inventory of the local library and was soon buying bags of romances at garage sales. In high school, with the encouragement of my father (who I think was a little concerned about the steady diet of romances) , I read over eighty of the Franklin Library's One Hundred Greatest Books ever written - including Tolstoy, Confucius, Plato, and the entire works of Shakespeare. Some of them were tough going for a teenager, but the experience would prove an invaluable foundation for college. After reading War and Peace, I wasn't easily intimidated. For some reason Monica decided to go into writing and not fashion. After graduation, I loaded up the VW (Jetta not Bus) and trekked down I-5 to attend the University of Southern California, majoring in Political Science and minoring in English (see why all that reading helped!) . I joined the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, and when I wasn't studying or at football games, did my best to support the local bartending industry. Ah, the good old days. With that kind of fun, four years of college wasn't quite enough. So leaving Tommy Trojan behind, I traveled back up north to Palo Alto for three more years of study at Stanford Law School. Once I survived the stress of the first semester, law school proved to be one of the best times of my life - garnering me a JD, life-long friends, a husband, and an unexpectedly intimate knowledge of baseball. (See "The Baseball Odyssey" below) .Law School was also where I fell in love with Scotland. In my third year, I took a Comparative Legal History class, and wrote a paper on the Scottish Clan System and Feudalism. So I immediately dropped out of law school and went on to write Scottish Historical Romances ... well no, not quite. You see, I always knew I wanted to be a lawyer. My father was a lawyer, I was a "poet" (i.e., not
