I write romance

Good morning. Let’s get going. I write Romance. Pretty much any kind of romance, but my two favorites are western historicals and Regencies. Today I’d like to concentrate on the former, but I may get distracted and drift into the Regency period.

Commoner By Choice was released today, and the ebook is available at amazon, KOBO, the NOOK store, the iBookstore, and a whole bunch of other ebooksellers. The trade paperback will soon be available at Amazon. It’s the tenth book in my “Behind the Ranges” series, although there is also a novella that I’ve never figured out how to number. 4 1/2, since it comes after the fourth book? Does it matter?

“Behind the Ranges?” That’s from “the Explorer,” a poem by Rudyard Kipling, and a favorite of mine since I first read it a long time ago. If you are interested, you can find it at http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_explorer.htm .

Here’s the “official” blurb for Commoner By Choice:

The heyday of gold discoveries is over in Idaho Territory, but there are still fortunes to be found. Eliza Jane Dollarhide believes that one is buried somewhere near a tiny mining camp deep in the wilderness. Her guide is Micah King, young, widowed, highly recommended–and Black. Never having known a person of color, Eliza is at first apprehensive, but soon learns that Micah is both a gentleman and a superbly competent guide.

A good thing, too, for soon after they reach the isolated gold mining town of Yellowjacket, they realize they face deadly danger. Someone is after the papers Eliza came to retrieve, and will stop at nothing, not even wanton murder, to get them. Only one road leads out of Yellowjacket, so Micah guides Eliza along a dangerous trail through the wilderness, depending on dim memories of a long-ago journey through almost impenetrable mountains. As they travel, each learns to know the other, and soon love blooms between them.

Impossible love, for Eliza is white. So even if they survive their ordeal–and escape whoever is trying to kill them–sooner or later they will have to part.

Or will they? Surely there must be a way they can be together, be happy.

So who is Micah King? Before I answer that, let’s go back in history, back to 1845, when Hattie Rommel came West on the Oregon Trail. Oh, wait, we can’t do that, because I’d have to give away the plot of the first Book, The Queen of Cherry Vale. Suffice it to say that she never made it to Oregon, but settled in a secluded valley in Idaho that eventually became the home of two families, the Lachlans and the Kings. But getting to that point was almost more than she could do.

Events (and characters) in that first book led to a second, Ice Princess. It’s about an unusual woman, daughter of an American fur trapper and a Bannock woman, and a remarkable man who, desperate to escape slavery and live free, walked across the continent to a place where he could be king of his own small world. After being vilely abused by a gang of renegades, Flower vows to go to live with her godfather in England, where she would be safe. William knows that if he follows her, he risks being taken as an escaped slave, but he loves her enough to risk it. And then… Well, that’s enough of a teaser.

In The Duchess of Ophir Creek, a boy who came West with Hattie ventured out into the world, eventually returns to Idaho Territory to pay an old debt. Instead of the wilderness he’d escaped, however, he finds a booming gold camp, a pair of Chinese children who need him, and a fight to the death. Only one of the children, isn’t a child, but a beautiful young woman who believes she knows what he needs.

Time passes, and families grow.