Book Title:  THE MAD BARON’S BRIDE Character Name: Leda Wroth (formerly Caledonia Toplady, formerly Caledonia Hill)   How would you describe your family or your childhood? I would describe my childhood as idyllic, I suppose, though I certainly had no comparison. My father called himself a gentleman and owned an estate near Cheltenham, in Gloucestershire. I adored my older sister, Emilia. She managed the ladylike accomplishments that so pleased our mother while I, sadly, was ever escaping my governess to romp out of doors, preferably with a book of poetry in hand. I used to pen poems myself and pin them to trees for the fairies to find. Those were innocent days.   What was your greatest talent? Not poetry, certainly! I have a talent for…hmm. How shall I say this? Resolving thorny, yet delicate personal matters. Dealing with scandal and gossip. Unearthing the truth behind a man’s façade. Discerning whether a woman’s love interest will guard her heart or turn out to betray her. I like to think I set young people on the path to true love, though it’s more often I find myself advising a young woman to harden her heart to someone unworthy or set her…

Excerpt from The Painter Takes an Earl by Misty Urban   The key to the garden gate was exactly where the gardener she’d spied on earlier that day had left it when his work was done. Harriette wouldn’t have asked someone to prop the door open for her. London’s all too active criminal element wouldn’t refrain from attempting to rob a house with dozens of people in it. The city’s thieves were wildly inventive, according to Jock, her groom. Men slid into houses during the day and then hid to let their cronies inside at night. Boys were pushed through windows to open an inside door, or lamplighters enjoined to leave ladders against the sides of houses. How Jock knew all of this, she couldn’t guess, since his former profession had been respectable. She could, of course, have chosen the simpler but more unreliable approach of milling around Grosvenor Square waiting for Renwick to step outside his house. She could still try to stroll inside with the other guests and ask the butler to announce her. And what would he say? “Miss Harriette Smythe of Shepton Mallet, presumed bastard daughter of a refugee foreigner posing as a noblewoman. Would-be painter.”…

Book Title:  THE FORGER AND THE DUKE Character Name: Amaranthe Illingworth   Amaranthe, the heroine of THE FORGER AND THE DUKE, is being interviewed by Derwa, the young child of her maid, Eyde. Eyde and Amaranthe left Cornwall six years before this conversation taking place in Amaranthe’s home in George Court, London, 1776.   So we begin. How would you describe your childhood? Idyllic, though I didn’t know it at the time. My father was the vicar of St. Cleer, a small, ancient village in Cornwall. I never heard him raise his voice, not even in the heights of a sermon. My mother was the daughter of a lens maker, a respectable trade. Her family came from Portugal; they were conversos, Jews who converted to Catholicism during the Inquisition in order to keep their home and their lives. You’ve met Joseph, who is older than I by four years. He tormented me but lightly, as I helped him with his studies, and he would not have been accepted into Oxford without me. The only time my mother scolded us was that winter Joseph dared me to walk out on the ice over the pond near our home, and I did….