About the Author
People frequently ask us how two people manage to write as a team, and the best answer we've been able to come up with is that we cannot imagine writing without one another. It truly helps to have another brain to bounce ideas off or park characters and thoughts in.
Members of both New Jersey Romance Writers and Romance Writers of America for seven years, we currently juggle life and beginning our professional writing career with the support of our two husbands, six children and assorted pets. Susan is the Vice President of a local bank and Mary Lou works part-time as a grant writing consultant/administrator for local non-profits.
The Irish Blessing series we are creating for Zebra Ballad Romance highlights our belief in achieving your heart's desire through love's special magic. The Reilly Brothers: Bryan, Devin and Quin, are heroes on a mission to save their family shipyard and preserve the livelihood of all the people who live on their home island at the mouth of Ireland's beautiful Shannon River.
Each brother has his own reason for wanting to be the one to set things right during their father's illness. Each finds the path toward their goal and the one fate has in mind are not the same. And with the help of an ancient family heritage, each discovers their true destiny in the arms of an enticing stranger with an agenda all her own.
Strong characters with deep motivations and conflict, twisted together with a little magic and a lot of passion--Just the kind of stories we like to read ourselves!
We hope you will enjoy them! Visit our website at elizabethkeys.com
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Devin Reilly slipped from the mare's back and rushed toward the carriage, his first concern for the hapless occupant whose frightened gaze had forced him after the vehicle. He braced one foot against the wheel and levered himself up enough to reach the door handle, pulling it open with a jerk.
"Are you all right?" he called into the darkened confines. He couldn't make out anything for a moment until one pale hand extended up from the gloom.
"Yes, I think so." There was a slight rustle of petticoats and short whisper. Although he couldn't make out the word, it sounded distinctively like a muttered curse. "Could you help me out?"
Devin stretched out to grasp her gloved hand, locked his fingers with hers and pulled. A hot frission of awareness sizzled up his arm like a jagged bolt of lightening. Sweat prickled the back of his neck as thunder pounded against his ears in a wild storm only he could hear. His breath loc ked in his throat and he fought the instinctive desire to release his grip as the contact shot into his heart and hurtled straight through his soul.
The Blessing. He grimaced and pulled her into the sunlight as Granny's words echoed through his mind, clearer than ever before.
'Tis a sound once heard that lingers on.
"Not now." The words groaned out of him as he pulled the girl to safety. The Blessing signaled life-altering events. "I don't have time for this now."
The knowin' is up to us, the doin's another part.
She slid against him as he helped her down. The touch of her body against his echoed through him, a relentless summer storm circling around and through his being without mercy. Thunder and lightening. Blessing or Curse?
He set her on her feet and held her for a moment longer and a heartbeat closer than necessary. His mind's frantic signals to release her somehow did not quite make it to his hands as they tightened on her trim waist.
It is a feeling once felt, always remembered.
The Blessing signaled the need to make a decision, to set a course for your heart's desire, but all he could think of was the overwhelming urge to gather her to him and never let go. Impossible.
Her dark gaze, wide and unfathomable, trailed his face before locking with his own. Smoky amber, fathomless and eternal. Her lips parted in a small oh, as if she felt something of the power surging between them. She smelled of ginger and chamomile and he couldn't shake the certainty that despite the distance he'd traveled and the journey he had yet to face, he had just come home.
A sight once seen and never forgotten.
Unable to release her, he seemed just as unable to breath, to move, other than to lean forward and cover her parted lips with his own. Home indeed. Who was this woman?
"Mo chroi." The Gaelic endearment echoed from deep inside. My heart.
Longing swept through him in a heady, unstoppable torrent at the taste of her mouth. All vestiges of sanity and purpose vanished as the need to gather her to him crested and broke over his common sense, drowning all rational thought. Her lips seemed frozen beneath his for a fraction of time, then she melted against him like water rippling along a shore. She tasted as sweet as rain on a summer afternoon, felt as soft as a breeze floating in from the back meadow at home.
Home. Beannacht Island. A sharp reminder of his objective in traveling to America pierced the haze. As if this entire adventure would not be enough to explain, the vision of his elder brother Quin's frowning censure over the public display Devin was creating with this woman swooped in.
Devin tore his mouth away and stepped back.
