Excerpt:

"I don't want you going any further with this, Francie. Have you forgotten that one unfortunate girl is dead? And no one knows what has happened to Angel. I don't want you getting mixed up in this any further. And I certainly don't you attending any witches' meetings."

For a moment I couldn't say a word. What made him think that he could forbid me to do anything? Moving out to the suburbs had brought us more than a change in locale. Somehow we had turned back the clock on fifty years of social change as well. I was living in an episode from the "I Love Lucy" show of the 1950's. Sam might just as well have been Ricky Ricardo forbidding Lucy to engage in one of her crazy schemes.

Well, I was no Lucy, and he couldn't speak to me as if I was a child, either.

"Sam, I have to do this. I thought you understood that I have gotten personally involved."

"The police can investigate this," he insisted. "That's their job. It's not yours."

"And just what is my job?"

You might think that my husband, with his advanced academic degrees and inarguably great intellect would recognize a potential trap being sprung in front of him. But Sam plunged on, as heedless as any man might have been.

"Your job is to run this house and take care of Savannah. Oh, and of course, there's your technical writing work as well," he added as an afterthought.

I think I actually felt my blood boiling, or a similar sensation.

"Do you really believe that?"

I tried to stay calm, but my skin was very warm to the touch as I rubbed cream on my face, and my hands were shaking slightly.

"Yes, no, oh, I don't know, Francie. Perhaps I'm not expressing myself too well. I just don't want you getting hurt."

With that he kissed me on the forehead, then drew me into his arms.

I said nothing, but I knew my body wasn't yielding, as it normally did, to his. After a minute he let go and sighed.

"I didn't say anything when you went to Seattle to interview Angel's parents, even though I felt it was a needless risk for you to take. Enough is enough, Francie. Let this matter rest. Getting mixed up with occult practices is unlikely to solve anything, and it will just expose you to danger."

"From witches, I suppose. Sam, haven't you heard anything I've said over the past few weeks? Witchcraft, the way Maggie practices it, is pretty harmless. What isn't harmless is whatever killed Jessie. And if Angel is in danger--"

I swallowed hard.

Author BIO: Home for Maureen Mackey is the towering firs and misty rains of the Pacific Northwest. Writing is her life-long dream, which first surfaced when she was in the third grade. Ambitiously, she wrote an entire table of contents to an original fairy tale, and then began writing the chapters only to get hopelessly mired in chapter four. Happily, she’s never gotten stuck like that again, (perhaps because she doesn’t write tables of contents anymore), and to date she has written several contemporary and historical romances, as well as a romantic suspense trilogy.

Born in Los Angeles, California, she was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and earned her bachelors of arts degree in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara. While studying English literature and history, she fell in love with the eighteenth-century and Regency England, areas she continues to enjoy researching and writing about. Determined to become a working writer, she obtained a masters of journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, which led to jobs as a staff writer and free-lancer for a number of publications.

In her journalistic career Maureen has written feature articles and book reviews for newspapers, which include the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner and The Oregonian, as well as profiles and in-depth reporting pieces for magazines such as Learning, Change, Darkroom Photography and Monterey Life. Maureen has also written restaurant reviews in tandem with her photographer husband, Tom White, for The Multnomah Village Post, a monthly newspaper in Portland, Oregon. She is a contributing writer to Portland Cheap Eats, (Sasquatch Books, 1999) and Portland Best Places, (Sasquatch Books, 2001).

Her Regency romance novel, Lord Peter’s Page, won first place in the 1996 Top O’ The Trees, a writing competition sponsored by the Regency Plume, before being published by Awe-Struck E-Books. She is a member of the Romance Writers of America, its Portland chapter, Rose City Romance Writers, and the Beau Monde, a special-interest chapter for writers of Regencies.

In addition to her writing, Maureen manages a technical communications business with her husband Tom. In her spare time (what she has of it!) she enjoys prowling through used book stores, gardening, listening to music (especially when played by her two teen-age band student sons) and traveling with Tom, her best friend and companion for the past 27 years. In addition to being busy with her family, she happily copes with a menagerie of animals that includes two large, mixed-breed dogs, two cats, and various assorted fish and rodents.