Tavish MacGregor has never seen the Scottish Highlands, but he feels their call all the same. Orphaned, abused, and robbed of all but pride, he apprentices himself to a North Carolinian shipwright in hopes of returning to his ancestral home. When he meets beautiful, spirited Catalyn Shaw, Tavish discovers a new home and family beneath the longleaf pines. But his cruel master holds a deadly secret over his head, forcing him to choose between escaping to Scotland and staying with Catalyn. As tensions build between the colonies and the Crown, Catalyn faces her own heartbreaking decision—leave everything to be with Tavish, or stay and be torn apart forever.
A lifelong resident of the American South, Kit Hawthorne makes her home on a Texas farm that has been in her husband’s family for seven generations. She spent several years as a semiprofessional musician, singing, composing, and playing Irish pennywhistle in a Celtic folk band called The Outlanders. All those ballads and boat songs awakened in her a love for a Scottish heritage that spans both sides of the Atlantic. She’s an avid reader, especially of history, biography, mystery, theology, and romance, and enjoys logging her reads (and plotting her life) in her Bullet Journal. She also enjoys drawing, sewing, quilting, knitting, and restoring old furniture to beauty and usefulness. She is the author of the Truly Texas books, a contemporary romance series with Harlequin Heartwarming. This is her first historical novel.