By
Lisa Ann Verge
SYNOPSIS
A RITA finalist from Lisa Ann Verge, the multiple-award-winning author of historical and paranormal romance.
Rhys is a man accursed, forced to hide his scarred face behind a leather mask. When rumors reach Wales of an Irishwoman with healing powers, he crosses a sea to kidnap her. But Aileen is no frightened girl, and she will move the Welsh lord as no blue-blooded beauty ever has.
Possessed with the gift of ancient magic, Aileen knows her captor is a man more afflicted in spirit than flesh. She despises him for stealing her from home, but she can’t deny the passion that flares between them. Time may heal the scars on Rhys’s face . . . but Aileen fears it will take a miracle to change his unbelieving heart.
Rhys is a man accursed, forced to hide his scarred face behind a leather mask. When rumors reach Wales of an Irishwoman with healing powers, he crosses a sea to kidnap her. But Aileen is no frightened girl, and she will move the Welsh lord as no blue-blooded beauty ever has.
Possessed with the gift of ancient magic, Aileen knows her captor is a man more afflicted in spirit than flesh. She despises him for stealing her from home, but she can’t deny the passion that flares between them. Time may heal the scars on Rhys’s face . . . but Aileen fears it will take a miracle to change his unbelieving heart.
REVIEW
After weeks of “heavy”, although delightful, reading through some rather thick tombs of historical fiction, what a delight to take an afternoon and evening of a cold wet sleety day and curl up with one of my favorite authors. This time I went back and actually read her first publication from her college years…back when her head was still filled with chemistry formulas and other academia, though you would never know it to read this hot and steamy novel.
Set in Wales the end of the 1200s when England was still a wild land and the Throne of England did not truly include the land of Wales…There Once Was A Prince of Wales…. While a historical romance in its’ truest form, Faery Bride also was a bit of fantasy and enlarged on the strong superstitions of the local Welsh people of the era. Aileen, the young “doctor” or healer that was kidnapped from an island off the coast of Ireland and whisked away to the highlands of Wales to heal the Prince of the land, Rhys, was absconded because of the rumors of her healing skills beyond the “normal”. The Prince of the land had tried every healer and cure available for the last years to no avail and this was his last resort for a cure for the malady that had turned him from a tall handsome prince to a masked monster. In truth, she had come from an ancient line of healers and there was healing in her hands.
On the way to the healing, there was one small misadventure…Rhys was blindsided by Aileen’s beauty and instead of seeking healing, kidnaped her. Oops. One small descriptive about Aileen, she was a long tall red-headed firestorm (beauty is always in the mind of the beholder). Her temper and spirit matched her fiery mane and the rest of the delightful rollicking story kept me in stitches or fanning my fancy to the final pages as happily ever after finally came to the rescue of the remainder of castle and its population.
This earlier work was totally different from the modern women’s literature that Lisa has been writing in the last few years. Her personality and storyline were just as mesmerizing and entertaining as I rolled through the pages, figuratively and otherwise (smile wink). I look forward to Lisa continuing to re-release some of her original works for our continued enjoyment in the coming months. My smile will continue to widen in delight.
INTERVIEW
Hello Lisa, I love getting a chance to catch you between exciting books. Just a couple of questions.
Don’t you have a new book being released in a few days? Can you give us a blurb about it?
I do have a new book coming out, writing as Lisa Verge Higgins – another novel about the warmth and complexity of women’s lives and women’s friendships. SENSELESS ACTS OF BEAUTY is about three women—two high school friends who grew up in very different parts of their hometown, and the fourteen-year-old daughter one of them gave up for adoption.
Tess has a secret: For fifteen years she has been furtively following the life of the daughter she gave up as an infant for adoption. But when Sadie runs away from home determined to find her birth mother, Tess has no choice but to hunt down the desperate girl in the one place she dreads—Pine Lake, where a terrible, buried secret threatens to destroy them both.
It’s being released on March 10th, can’t wait!
Other than “because I needed to earn money”. What made you think to try your hand at writing a book in the middle of your post-graduate work? Geez, my daughter is in the middle of hers and she can’t see straight, she is so busy.
Graduate school is grueling, as your daughter knows, and I didn’t actually write while I was working on my Ph.D. It was only after I took a leave of absence that I put pen to paper (actually, fingers to manual-Smith-Corona! Anyone remembers those days?) Than the stories flooded out of me. I wrote with no expectation of publication, only to use the creative side of my brain which I’d apparently have to suppress while doing lab work, teaching introductory chemistry, and taking a few classes of my own. It was such a relief to have time to write!
What is the next book from your delightfully youthful and wicked past? How many did you write while you were in graduate school and just after, before “retiring”?
There’s an old story about Pavarotti. Apparently, he intended to become a teacher in his youth, but he loved to sing. So he studied and he sang and agonized about which career path to follow. He finally asked his father for advice. His father said: You can’t sit in two chairs.
Thankfully, Pavarotti sat in the right chair!
That’s sort of how I felt after I wrote (and sold) three historical romances. Should I stick with my stable job as a chemist? Or should I strike out and make a go at writing? Although I miss the lab now and again, I’ve never regretted my choice.
As for my next book from my wicked past . . .I recently released HEAVEN IN HIS ARMS, which is a twist on the mail-order bride theme set in colonial North America. Genny is a “King’s Girl,” one of dozens of women swept off the streets of Paris to be shipped to the colonies to marry settlers. Except the man she’s married off to is an explorer with big plans and no intention of settling. But city-smart, determined Genny has traveled across an ocean to start a new life, so she sets off into the wild to track him down.
How cool…new book on my stack J
With your wonderful recent success in Women’s fiction and literature, do you think you will ever be tempted to return to historical romance again? If so, What century would we find you in next?
Funny you should ask, because during a recent one-month writing challenge, I penned about a third of the sequel to The Faery Bride! It follows the adventures of Aileen’s dreamy, favored sister Cairenn, who stumbles across a mysterious man washed up on the shores of her island. It was a lot of fun to write!
That book – if I finish it! – will be the fourth installment in the Celtic Legends Series. I enjoyed returning to that world—the world of The Faery Bride, Twice Upon A Time, and The O’Madden—where there’s always love and magic in the air.
Something tells me, Lisa, that no matter what genre you tackle you would make it something that wraps around our hearts and minds and gives each of us readers a bad case of “gotta have more of this!”
Thank you for taking the time from your hectic schedule to once again drop by and say high. You are always welcome.
Thanks so much Karen! The pleasure is mine.
Lisa Verge Higgins is the bestselling author of seventeen novels that have been published worldwide and translated into as many languages—quite a switch for this former Ph.D. candidate in chemistry. Currently writing women’s fiction for Hachette, Lisa’s books have finalled for a RITA, won the Golden Leaf and Bean Pot Awards, and twice she has cracked Barnes & Noble’s General Fiction Forum’s top twenty books of the year. She currently lives in New Jersey with her husband and their three teenage daughters, who never fail to make life interesting.
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