Heart of Stone goes live on Thursday, Aug. 29th!
I'm so excited to get to Nicholas/William's story. Oh, my sweet William with his hard, grey gaze. He had been through much in his life. He’s the youngest of the three MacPherson brothers. He has no memories of the family he lost when he was two—only the people who left him after that. I won’t lie, he broke my heart and brought me to tears once or twice. But he’d run from memories long enough. I wanted William to grow as Nicholas, to find his happily ever after, and the only way to do that was to startle him awake with a reunion he never expected.
Julianna might be remembered from her brief appearance in Heart of Ashes, when she saw William at St. Peter’s Abbey and called him a childish fancy. She’d been too afraid of his Scottish heritage (after seeing the Scots murder everyone in her village of Berwick two months earlier).
I knew how much Nicholas loved Julianna. I wanted to bring her back, to return what he’d lost. I wanted his HEA to be with her, what I found when I went back to her was a very different Julianna, with a very horrifying marriage behind her. One that drove her to do something drastic and terrible. The last four years had changed her. She went from being a pampered noble’s daughter to a woman of great substance, a woman I would be proud and humbled to call my friend.
She had another difficult task ahead: save the man she had always loved from the stones about to bury him and bring him back to life. She’d been there. She knew the path. She’d get him back.