After funerals, illness, snowstorms, power outages…The Book That Would Not End, Greville’s book, is finally done and submitted to my editor. Drum roll signifyng relief, please! This book is the story of the brother of WAIF’s heroine, Joanna Anders Merrill. When we last hear of Greville in WAIF, he’s been abducted by the venal estate agent Barksdale, beaten and sold to a press gang. In Greville’s book (which I’m calling The Sailor and the Baron’s Daughter,) after the intervention of their noble cousin The Marquess of Englemere (Nicky from THE WEDDING GAMBLE) Greville has been rescued from service as a common seaman and, wounded after an action against pirates off the coast of Africa, sent back to the Coastal Brigade while the Admiralty settles the matter of his future. Also at Nicky’s intervention, he’s been invited to reside with Ned’s friend Lord Bronning, whose lovely daughter Amanda rejected Ned’s tentative courtship in WAIF.

Amanda is astonished and outraged when this grimy, wounded sailor limps over her father’s entry. What could Papa have been thinking, to have agreed to house such a specimen? Greville, a man whom eight months at sea at the bottom of the social ladder have given an entirely new perspective on life and his place in it, tends to agree with her opinion.

Amanda can’t wait to get to London to begin her Season and fulfill her life-long dream of making a brilliant match and becoming a political hostess to rival the fabled Duchess of Devonshire. Greville can’t wait to recover and try to figure out what he’s going to do with his life. It seems they have nothing at all in common…until an attraction they just can’t master and a danger to family and home throw the two together.

I’m waiting to see what my editor will think of Greville. There will surely be revisions. Then it’s on to the next project, another matter for which I’m awaiting my editor’s decision. It could be the first book in what I’m calling the Brotherhood of Badajos, the story of four soldiers who band together to survive the storming of that fortress city and pledge a lifelong friendship. Or something else. More on that later.