Release day has arrived! My new historical, Lover for Ransom, is available at Ellora’s Cave in all eReader formats. To celebrate, I’m blogging today, (March 20) with Kerry Freeman HERE and March 21, on Susana’s Parlour HERE. On March 22, I’ll be guest blogging on Silken Sheets and my Romance Writers of America chapter, Southern Magic’s Romance Magicians Blog. There’ll be chances to win a free download, character interviews, author interviews, and some tidbits about where I got my inspiration for my hero and heroine, oh, and my favorite secondary character in Lover for Ransom, an attitudinal horse named String Bean.
Lover for Ransom
Debra Glass
Ransom Byrne has been ravaged by guilt since an illness rendered his little sister blind. The former Confederate cavalry officer has resolved to make amends by hiring a Yankee tutor who’ll hopefully restore order to his sister’s life. Once that’s accomplished, he’ll be free to leave Byrne’s End.
From the moment she steps off the train in Tennessee, Cathleen Ryan makes a startling first impression. With her feminist ideas, the irrepressible Bostonian quickly outrages everyone—especially Ransom. He deems the bespectacled teacher too uptight and prim for his tastes. Appearances, however, are deceiving. She tenders decadent proposals that shock and intrigue him, and sultry nights spent submitting to his every illicit request offer them both love and redemption.
But when her steadfast convictions attract the attention of dangerous men, Cathleen risks losing her chance of becoming more than just a lover for Ransom.
Inside Scoop: This nineteenth-century tale contains mild violence, spanking, sloppy puppy kisses, more spanking, fiery suffragette speeches and an attitudinal horse named String Bean.
A Romantica® historical erotic romance from Ellora’s Cave
Click HERE to buy Lover for Ransom in all eReader format at Ellora’s Cave today!
Excerpt -
An Excerpt From: LOVER FOR RANSOM
Copyright © DEBRA GLASS, 2013
All Rights Reserved, Ellora's Cave Publishing, Inc.
“Don’t you ever read anything for pleasure?”
She toyed with the earpieces of her glasses, her mind fixed on the way his velvety drawl had played havoc with the word pleasure. She cleared her throat. “There are far too many important things to read to waste my poor eyesight on frivolities, Mr. Byrne.”
He closed her book, set it on the table and stood. Cathleen flinched as his leg brushed hers when he passed on his way to the bookcase. He opened it and pressed his fingertip to his lips in thought as he perused its contents.
Cathleen studied his casual stance. His weight shifted to one leg and his head cocked to the side. He looked back at her, stared so long it made her insides quiver and then turned back to the collection and removed a slender book from the shelf.
“I shall read to you then,” he said with a smile and he returned to his chair. “To protect your poor eyesight from…frivolities.”
Cathleen gulped as his long fingers opened the book and he thumbed through the pages. It looked like a child’s volume in his hands and she couldn’t help but wonder what he’d chosen.
“Ah, here,” he said, placing his elbow casually on the armrest of his chair to hold the book at a comfortable height. “It was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea, that a maiden lived there that you may know by the name of Annabel Lee.”
Edgar Allan Poe. Of course she was familiar with the famed Baltimore author. But she’d read his works in braille, and certainly had never heard them read aloud by a man with such a hauntingly husky voice. This night—this moment, with the clock’s pendulum ticking off the seconds in time with the poem’s meter and the flickering glow of the lamp—seemed to be made for the dark, beautifully macabre poem about a woman who’d died before her time.
“For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams of the beautiful Annabel Lee,” Ransom continued.
Cathleen closed her eyes, picturing a pair of young lovers walking hand in hand on a stormy beach. Ransom’s voice transported her and she felt the anguish of the author who’d lost his love only to find himself frequented by her ghost.
“And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side, of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride, in the sepulcher there by the sea, in her tomb by the sounding sea.”
Eyes still closed, Cathleen sat in the stillness, absorbing the song contained in the words. When her lashes fluttered open, she was surprised at the tear that traced down her cheek. Blushing, she swept it away. “Very nice, Mr. Byrne.”
He raised his eyebrows in mock warning.
She giggled. She actually giggled. Closing her eyes for a split second, she struggled to compose herself. She was acting like a bashful schoolgirl. “Ransom,” she corrected, her voice but a breath.
In that instant, something had suddenly changed between them and she was at a loss to decipher it.
Staring, he inhaled. “With your hair loose, you reminded me of the woman in that poem.”
Her eyes widened. “Dead?”
He chuckled without mirth. “No. Wild and windswept.”
This time, Cathleen did begin to smooth her hair down.
“No,” he said. “No. Don’t touch it. It’s perfect the way it is.” He must have realized he’d said too much. “I mean, it’s only you and me. There’s no need for pretense.”
Cathleen nodded. Her gaze fell to the brown leather covered book in his hand. “Do you believe such love exists?”
He snorted and closed the book. “This was the fancy of a man who imbibed too much and who thought too much. Love like that is for the young and foolish—for people who haven’t experienced the things I have.”
Cathleen gnawed her bottom lip. “Are you referring to your time during the war?”
He suddenly looked uncomfortable. His big and masculine exterior seemed incongruous with his sudden unease. “Yeah,” he admitted. “I saw and did things no living human being should ever have to see or do. Things that’ll make you hate yourself.”
Cathleen didn’t know how to respond. Newspapers told of the hardships and combat. She’d seen soldiers boarding trains to join the fighting. She’d watched neighbors don their widow’s weeds. She herself had received a telegram informing her that her brother had been killed. But even when the war had come into her very home, it had always seemed a distant thing. But these Tennesseans had lived the war. This man had fought it. Federal troops had occupied their home. While on the train, she’d overheard tales about frightening guerilla raids from both sides, about men who didn’t live by any code of decency, who took what they wanted and killed indiscriminately. These families had lived day to day, wondering if their hard-earned food stores, their homes or even their very lives would be taken from them.
“No,” Ransom continued. “The war was anything but glory.”
Still, Cathleen remained uncharacteristically silent. While she pitied the plight of these people, in her eyes, the war had been a necessary evil, a vehicle through which an entire race had broken the bonds of slavery and declared themselves free. And yet, she didn’t feel free to admit her thoughts on the matter to Ransom Byrne. Not tonight.
“What about you, Cathleen?” he asked, his gaze finding and holding hers, daring her to correct him. “Do you believe in that kind of love?” His tone was almost mocking.
Realizing he’d shifted the conversation back to the poem, she let out a laugh. “Of course not. In fact, I don’t agree with marriage at all and I shall never marry.”
“How did you come to this conclusion?”
“Contrary to what you might think, I haven’t chosen a life of spinsterhood because I am bookish and outspoken, not to mention plain.” She straightened, confused at the way a belief she’d always maintained with pride, now hurt. “No. I simply do not accept as true that a woman should have to marry and live out her days in subjugation.”
“Subjugation?” he asked and then laughed. “I’ve always thought that was the other way around. All the married men I know are pretty beholden to their wives.”
“That’s but a puerile joke. We all know that marriage gives husbands rights to a woman’s livelihood and even her body, if he so chooses to claim them. For a woman, marriage is nothing but legalized…rape.”
This time, both his eyebrows shot up. “That’s a mighty strong word.”
“A married man can demand his rights anytime he chooses. Therefore, if a woman is forced into coitus with him, it is legalized rape.” Cathleen lifted her chin, awaiting an argument. It was a strong word. But he needed to know how she felt about subjugation. She needed him to know it.
Instead, he surprised her. “Don’t you ever feel desire?”
Yes, I’m feeling it this very instant.
The American Civil War celebrates its sesquicentennial in 2012. Those turbulent years between 1862 and 1865 were a defining moment in our nation’s history. While the Revolutionary War created the United States, the Civil War determined what sort of nation the US would be. The Civil War answered two fundamental questions: Was the United States a confederation of sovereign states or an indivisible nation with a strong national government? And; Would a nation, founded on a declaration that all men were created equal continue to operate as the largest slaveholding country in the world?
Book one in the Phantom Lovers series.
Unable to support herself and her beloved servants, Widow Carrie Hatcher contemplates the unthinkable—offering her services for money. Forced to board wounded Colonel Wesley McEwen in her home, Carrie vows to make the striking Confederate soldier her first “client”.
They say she’s a Rebel spy…
Tough…or tender? If she follows her heart, she won’t have to choose.
Ghostly legends abound wherever history has made its mark. Skeletons of the Civil War follows the ghosts of the Army of Tennessee from the bloody Battle of Shiloh to its decimation on the killing fields of Franklin. Combining the craft of a story-teller (Glass), with the expert knowledge of a military historian (Mathews), the stories in this book are packed with archival photographs and intriguing first-hand accounts. Read fresh, spine-tingling accounts of a headless horseman who gallops through the eerie cedar glades at Stones River, the tale of the regiment which earned the nickname The Bloody Ninth at Shiloh, the phantom regiment at Resaca, the spirit of Tennessee’s dashing Boy General, who followed a woman home, the mysterious empty graves near the Hazen monument, weirdness at The Dead Angle, true accounts of spirits who haunt the cavernous rooms of Tennessee’s grand plantation houses, the tragic tale of Captain Tod Carter who was shot down within sight of his home, and many more.
There is something about an antebellum mansion that whispers ghost. From the rolling cotton fields of Colbert County, Alabama to the haunted hills of Tennessee, there is hardly a pre-Civil War dwelling that cannot boast of some resident spirit or similar unexplained phenomena.