Nicolo: The Powerful Sicilian (Mills & Boon Modern)

Sandra Marton, a best-selling American author, wrote her first novel when she was seven. It was a romance, which probably says a lot about fate and the mysterious paths that sometimes lead us through life. By the time she was ten, she’d read Gone With The Wind even though that famous scene where Rhett carries Scarlett up the stairs puzzled the heck out of her. / Sandra loved school, hated gym, and graduated high school at 15 1⁄2. More important, she fell head over heels in love that same year and finally figured out what that scene in Gone With The Wind was all about. / At university, Sandra studied Creative Writing. She also studied to be an elementary school teacher because everyone knew you couldn’t possibly earn your living as a writer. Life got very busy. Sandra married the boy she’d met at 15 1⁄2, began teaching, became a mom, stopped teaching, took in every stray cat and dog she found and eventually ran for public office and won, but she never forgot she had once dreamed of being a writer. In what little spare time she had, she wrote poems and short stories. The poems were dark and murky. The short stories were dark but not quite as murky. She even sold some of them but she knew she hadn’t yet found the kind of stories she really wanted to write. / And then, one day, she thought, I wonder if I could write a romance novel... / So she wrote one and sent it into the world where it was rejected in some places and given encouragement in others until her husband, that boy she’d fallen crazy in love with so many years before, took matters into his own hands and mailed her book to Harlequin Presents. / Seventy-five plus books later, he still loves to remind her of that.