When the Queen of Misrule takes over the town, sins are laid bare, and brothers lose their hearts.

When Cilla Wintergreen supports her sister’s plans to punish the man who ruined their friend, she helps in a miscarriage of justice, for they catch the wrong man. But no harm is done, except to her imagination. She cannot forget the sight of their victim, half naked, his torso shining in the candlelight. Just as well she is unlikely to meet him again. Until she does.

When Drake Sanderson is mistaken for his licentious older brother Colin, he readily forgives the women who captured him. After all, they release him when they realize he isn’t Colin. But the event changes his life, for one of those women captures his heart, and he won’t give up until she agrees to be his wife or marries another.

When Livy Wintergreen tries to take revenge on a cruel seducer, and catches the wrong man, she puts in train a series of events she could not have imagined. For she had long thought she was too old, too contentious, and too independent to find a man to love her.

When Bane Sanderson rescues his brother from female revelers out for retribution, he did not expect their queen to consume his heart and mind, until courting her seems the only sensible course of action. If she is not put off by his scars, his irregular birth will disgust her. But he must try.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FTFYXNXB

Two brothers, two sisters, two love stories.

An Excerpt from A Gift to the Heart

Livy had come down to earth with a crash. Everything had been going so well. Sanderson had come in response to the letter. He had drunk the wine she had given him and passed out. Her collaborators had helped to strip him and put on the goat’s head. Exactly as they had planned.

And, oh, the uplifting sensation of striking back at all the men who thought they could have whatever they pleased while denying the same freedom to women!

Pacing beside the ass, surrounded by her temporary subjects, she had felt powerful, free, and above all, accepted. And then he had arrived. The man in the hood. Riding through the gathered women to haul their prisoner up onto his horse, and then delivering the devastating words that laid bare her mistake.

It didn’t help that something about his voice, his posture, his sheer presence made her tingle, and not in an unpleasant way. A ridiculous and shaming reaction to a complete stranger she had just offended.

Why had she insisted on having none of the locals in the room before Sanderson had been blinded by the goat head? She had meant to protect them from retaliation, and instead, she had led them into a debacle.

Though they didn’t seem downhearted. They were carrying on with the plans they’d had for the evening before the Maplehurst Hall party had joined them. Blankets had been spread out on the ground. Some of the matrons were carrying around baskets of food.

Several of the villagers were passing out jugs of wine. A group was singing. Livy had heard the tune before, but the scandalous lyrics were new to her.

“Come along, Miss Wintergreen,” said a girl from the village that Livy had met earlier in the evening. “Come and have fun.”

Livy allowed herself to be led to where her sister and other people from the house party were sitting, all mixed in with the villagers and other neighbors. “I am so sorry,” she said to them. “My mistake has ruined the evening.”

“Not your mistake,” someone protested. “You had no way of knowing that the silly boy would take the letter to the wrong brother.”

The whole neighborhood—but not the house party—had known that Colin Sanderson was holding a scandalous gathering at his house for Livy’s cousin Jasper Marple and his friends, all of whom were apparently cut from the same cloth. Mrs. Sanderson had gone to spend Christmas with her mother and had given every maid under forty leave to do likewise. Mr. Sanderson had responded by bringing in a carriage load of scandalous women from the nearest town.

“It sounds as if Colin Sanderson well and truly deserved a shaming,” Cilla observed. “What a pity we got the wrong brother. We didn’t even know there was more than one brother.”

“If I had asked someone who knows him to look…” Livy said.

“They are kind of alike,” another of the villagers offered. “Mr. Drake and Mr. Colin. Though I doubt Mr. Colin Sanderson looks so good with his shirt off! Mr. Drake works on the farms and such.”