The River Bend books have been in my head for years, and I’ve been searching for a way to write them. I initially thought of them as a series for Harlequin Special Edition, but when I looked deeper at the ideas I realized they needed more space and more complexity in story-telling than is possible in a series romance novel of less than 60,000 words. When I was invited to write for The Tule Group and Montana Born Books, it was so exciting to know that at last I’d found a home for these stories. Each of them centers around what happened on prom night in Marietta eighteen years ago,1996, and in the shorter novella that sets up the series we see that night from two more perspectives, those of high school teacher Kate and sheriff Harrison. Prom night is such an impossibly huge event in the mind of so many American high school kids. They hang so many expectations on it – that it’s going to be the best night of their lives, that it’s going to be the start of wonderful love, the launch of real life. For a lot of eighteen-year-olds, I suspect that prom night fizzles…