Bøger af Colleen L Donnelly

The nearly sixty year old pamphlet Rachel found contained everything her best friend, Lane, longed to know about the obscure history of his deceased great-grandfather. It touted the pianist's musical prowess, his success as a college music professor, and his uncanny knack for bringing out the best in his piano students. Rachel couldn't wait to show Lane her find, but the penciled-in comment at the bottom of the first page stopped her cold. "Justifiably shot in the back by his wife one morning as he was dressing, because of another woman." Set on a course of unraveling the truth about the 1930s life and murder of Lane's great-grandfather, Rachel discovers parallel truths about herself and Lane as she opens the story of his great-grandparents and the woman who was his great-grandfather's supposed lover.

Cate is a runner. She prefers to help her fiancé run his New York senate race, but she finds herself running instead to fix what's broken between her grandparents before he finds out - her grandmother has moved out of the family home, and her grandfather is accused of a pre-WWII relationship with a woman in Germany. Dietrich is a German journalist with a spotless reputation. He prefers facts, but he finds himself lost in a world of fiction instead to prove his novelist grandmother couldn't possibly have been the lover of a US runner in Berlin's 1936 Olympics - especially when that runner's granddaughter is Cate, a stubborn obstacle he should but can't ignore. Cate runs hard to cover up what Dietrich uncovers, until he shows her how it could have been - and how it could be again - that one can indeed love an enemy.

Neither Rex nor Regina wants a spouse, but they do have needs. Ranger Rex Duncan needs a false identity-just long enough to uncover a ring of Kansas ranch thieves. Answering Regina's ad for a temporary husband, he leaves his beloved red dirt of Oklahoma to assume that disguise. But the most obstinate woman he's ever known confounds his assignment, and with hair the red color that has always made his heart beat a little faster. Regina Howard needs a new Mrs. in front of her name-just long enough to reclaim her deceased husband's ranch, since Kansas law won't allow women to own property. When Rex answers her ad for a husband who can take orders as part of a brief business arrangement, she finds this stubborn man ignores her every command. Yet a good man is far more than just a name...

Cletus asked for Lana when she was barely more than a child. He told her grandmother he wanted a wife, not a bride, someone to keep his house the way he wanted it and to give him sons. He got more daughters than sons, and he also got James: "That boy," the one Cletus claimed wasn't his. Jim Dillon wanted Lana - he always had. He just hadn't expected her to be taken away and married to someone else so soon. Glen Morgan recognized the beauty underlying Lana's worn features, and he stepped in where Cletus hadn't, offering help to her and her children. Lana grew up under Cletus' demands, fulfilling what was expected of her - until his accusations that she'd done the unexpected and been unfaithful. Lana no longer looked at what might have been or what could be. She discovered what was most important, and she found it inside of herself.

The moment Martha noticed Raymond on the train, everything her mother warned against erupted - romantic notions, palpitating heart, the desire to write it all in a novel and tell the world. Martha lived and wrote that love story until the day Raymond handed her a sketch. "Want to see a picture of the girl I plan to marry?" The penciled profile resembled Martha... But when Raymond went away, she knew. She wasn't the girl he planned to marry. David was her father's apprentice, everything Martha's mother said made a good husband - hardworking, no romantic tendencies, no tolerance for writing about it. Martha added a fictional happy ending to her and Raymond's story and published it. Cleansed herself of romantic love, ready to marry David. Until a copy of her book appeared. Full of sketches, Raymond's version of their love story, drawings that enticed her heart to beat once again.

Annabelle Crouse is determined to reopen her great-grandmother's boarded-up house--and her shunned life. Many years earlier, after an unexplained absence, Julianne was relegated to a separate home by a rigidly unforgiving husband, and the Crouse women have suffered the disgrace of her assumed guilt ever since. Despite her family's strong disapproval, Annabelle is driven to pursue her mission through cobwebs and dust, finding the clues and the coded story left behind by her great-grandmother -- Why did she go? And why did she return? Annabelle has to know. Only one person, a man she grew up with but never noticed, stands with Annabelle as she discovers the parallels between her story and her great-grandmother's--two women, generations apart, experiencing what love truly is.