Who Wrote Marilla Before Anne And When Was It Published?

For one year, I believed Matteo De Luca had truly fallen in love with me. Our marriage began as an alliance, but he held me every night, kissed me before council meetings, and fastened the De Luca Donna brooch at my throat as if I already belonged beside him. Then his first love, Vanessa Ashford, came back. Within days, our official ceremony was postponed, her access was added to the Donna wing, and Matteo stopped wearing the family signet he once used to claim me in public. He said it was council business. But council business did not leave amber perfume on his skin. It did not sit beside him on a private jet to Palm Beach. And it certainly did not smile from the Donna’s chair while his friends watched me lose my place. The final humiliation came at a private dinner, when someone asked whether I was Matteo’s wife. He looked at me, then said calmly, “Elena and I have an arrangement.” That night, I stopped waiting to be chosen. Matteo could keep his first love, his title, and the home he let her enter. I packed my passport, my Florence contract, and the prenatal report he had never seen. Then I left New York with his child.

Meet Esmerelda Sleuth. Sleuth is her name and investigating is her game. (Paranormal Investigating, that is.) Esmerelda makes a good living as an investigator in a rather progressive firm. She lives a stable and sensible life until she meets Lance; an old money "hottie" who works for a real estate firm next to her building. After accepting an invitation for a weekend getaway party, she quickly discovers that Lance has a secret. He is wealthy. That part is true. And, yes, he's procured a job as a realtor in the building next door. His secret is that he belongs to an underground society of humans who didn't abandon their connection to magic centuries ago when religion declared it evil and he has traveled through time specifically to find her and bring her back to his time to marry him. If that isn't enough of a far fetched tale to absorb, he informs her that she was born in his time to a family belonging to that same secret society and was promised in marriage to him as an infant. When enemies who didn't want to see the union of families take place made attempts on her life, her parents sent her into the future and erased her memories of them as a precaution. Possessing virtually no belief in magic, ghosts, psychics, time travel, etc., it takes some doing on Lance's part to convince her to believe his story and go back with him. When she does, the lies, deceit and attempts on her life start all over again. Will she escape emotionally and physically unscathed? "The Other Side Of the Mirror" is a steamy-paranormal-romance- mystery-thriller and book one of the Esmerelda Sleuth series.

The most reckless thing I had ever done was turn my back on the Moretti name and leave St. Clair Harbor with Lucian DeLuca when the Commission pushed his family out and he had nothing left. For three years, we lived in a drafty Brooklyn loft and ducked black Chevrolets on winter nights. Then Lucian fought his way back to the East Coast table. Everyone started calling him Mr. DeLuca again,and I became Mrs. DeLuca, the woman he swore he would always protect. Then Clara Voss appeared. She had once saved his life as a night nurse at an underground clinic, and Lucian never forgot it. He bought her a clinic, protected her family, and let her step, inch by inch, into the middle of our marriage. He said he still loved me, but he also said I was spoiled, jealous, and needed to learn my place. So I did. I signed the divorce papers and left New York behind. Mrs. DeLuca was dead. Evelyn Moretti had come back.

Murdered by one of her fated mate’s women after he betrayed her, Lorelai wakes forty days before the marking ceremony and rejects Caelan before he can bind her again. To escape him—and prevent the massacre she remembers—she marries Karl Ashborne, Caelan’s much older, supposedly wolfless uncle, the man destined to be assassinated. But Karl hides the most powerful wolf of his generation, Lorelai carries the last royal witch blood, and an obsessive vampire prince is already preparing to claim her as his bride. In her first life, Lorelai gave Caelan everything: her loyalty, her body, and the mark that made their bond impossible to escape. He rewarded her by surrounding himself with other women—and one of them poisoned Lorelai, drove silver into her ribs, and left her to die. Now Lorelai has one chance to change the future. Her marriage to Karl is meant to be nothing more than a bargain: separate rooms, separate property, no sex, no mark, and the freedom to leave whenever she chooses. Karl offers her something Caelan never did—the right to decide what happens to her own life. But the man everyone calls weak is anything but harmless. Karl’s control hides a dangerous power, and every step Lorelai takes to prevent his murder draws her deeper into his world—and closer to the husband she never intended to desire. Meanwhile, Caelan refuses to accept that his rejected mate has chosen another man. The women responsible for Lorelai’s death begin gathering again. And Valerian Noctis, a beautiful and ruthless vampire prince, invokes an ancient blood right to seize Lorelai’s body, crown, and future. Saving Karl may stop Greyhaven from burning. Loving him may awaken a prophecy capable of restoring the witch dynasty the wolves destroyed—and plunging every kingdom into war.

Eliza Ward does not fall through time. Time bends toward her. Pulled from the present into Revolutionary America, Eliza becomes trapped in a landscape where history repeats unevenly, battles restart with variations, and memory functions as both anchor and weapon. She is not a chosen heroine, but a constant: a woman whose awareness destabilizes the moment itself. She meets Mercy Hale, a midwife and witch who understands time as a negotiation rather than a force to command. Mercy aids Eliza’s survival while refusing the role of savior, having already learned the cost of standing too close to history’s center. During a looping battle, Eliza saves Thomas Reed, a Continental soldier who does not shift when time does. Thomas is an anchor: steady, observant, unchanged across iterations. Their bond deepens in an almost-normal village where time briefly behaves. Eliza’s intervention triggers time’s response. Rather than immediate destruction, time collects interest. Mercy bargains to spare Eliza and Thomas, sacrificing her own future to stabilize the present. Time extracts payment from Eliza as well, stripping away her voice, the very tool she uses to name and hold moments in place. Silenced and unmoored, Eliza is violently displaced back into the original battle. Unable to anchor the moment, she watches Thomas die in the version of history that was always waiting beneath her defiance. Told in rotating perspectives between Eliza, Thomas, and Mercy, The Hours That Refused to Behave is a lyrical time-travel novel about revolution, restraint, and consequence, asking not whether history can be changed, but who pays when it is.

I’m trapped in this marriage… Yes, I’m only a wife on paper. Legally bound, but not in the way we live our lives. Six years have passed, yet I’ve lived like a single woman. But I’m not allowed to love the person I truly want. If there’s anything good that came out of this situation, it’s that we gained a comfortable life—and we no longer live in fear of being hurt again by my alcoholic father. And him? Enjoying his lustful life as if nothing happened in the past six years. An educated woman, yet powerless to escape this prison made of paper. “I didn’t ask for that money!! I worked for all of it. Why?! Don’t you remember what you did to me that night?! How you violated me?! How my body was left covered in bruises and marks?! You may have bought me with your money… but that will never change the evil thing you did.” “You only made me your whore once, Ethan!! You feel disgusted with me? Well don’t you worry, my husband—I feel the same way too. I’m still haunted by nightmares of that lustful night… how you tied me up and pinned me to the bed… how you forced yourself on me so hard because you thought I was Sabrina—the one who hurt you!!! The only thing I did was sell myself to you, but I’ve been trying to forget it all and make things right!!” “I am your wife, Ethan!!! Your wife on that damned piece of paper!!! So no matter what your mistress does… she will always remain just a mistress—as long as I choose it to be that way. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”