Mail order Bride, Fiona Webb gets cold feet on the stagecoach to meet her fiancé. Is he all he claims? Or is she hurtling toward a deadly mistake?
A handsome man in a photograph in the St. Louis Minneapolis Gazette holds a little girl in his arms seeking a mail order bride. Could they be the family Fiona longs for since losing her sister and parents to cholera? Or is the photo a deception created to trap an innocent heart?
James Nathaniel believes he’s found the perfect woman to share his life at last, and, anxious to finally meet her, he takes the Overland Stage to join her en route near the California border, only to find a cairn of stone. How can it be true?
If you enjoy historical romance about the American West and Gold Rush era, this sweet, and salty mail_order bride story will melt your heart. Available on Amazon Kindle and soon…a KDP Voice listen on audible. Looking for a short novella read to take on the plane, or keep you up to the wee hours? Grab this one now.
Inspiration
I love the California desert with its ancient origins, stark natural beauty, and enduring, spooky ghost stories. Lies in White Satin is not a ghost story, but it was inspired by one. If you ever visit the Anza Borrego Desert Natural History Museum, you can watch a film about this amazing and little-known desert and some of the characters and myths that populate its history.
The story goes that a young woman traveling on the Overland Stage to meet her true love died before she could complete her journey and now can be seen roaming the hills in a wedding dress on the nights of the full moon.
Lies in White Satin is a standalone twist on a ghostly myth. While it’s not a prequel to Kat Drennan’s Borrego Moon, this haunting novella shares the setting and history from her Love on the Fault Line Series.
Historical Note
Writing historical fiction is a joy, but it also presents problems you don’t run into in pure fiction; such as, the facts not fitting your story (those pesky facts). In my first draft of the story, James describes the labyrinths of Grace Cathedral in one of his letters to Fiona and she dreams of seeing them. I was sad to learn that the labyrinths did not exist in 1858. Fiona would have been able to see the little Grace Chapel from her guest wing. It was rebuilt on a larger location in 1868, and subsequently lost in the earthquake and fire of 1906 (that pesky fault line strikes again). A new, spectacular cathedral was built on what by then was known as Nob Hill rather than California Hill, completed in 1910. That cathedral included the famous labyrinths.