New Release! Lilly: Bride of Illinois

American Mail-Order Brides Series

On fifty consecutive days beginning November 19, 2015, a romance will be published featuring a mail order bride, one set in each of the fifty states. The books, written by forty-five authors, are being released in the order the states were admitted to the union. The stories all take place in 1890, when a factory fire in the East burns to the ground, leaving these women unemployed. These women answer mail-order bride ads in the Grooms' Gazette, and then head out to find their groom.

My contribution, Lilly: Bride of Illinois, book 21 in the American Mail-Order Bride Series is now available! It's a spin-off of my Brides with Grit Series featuring one of Pastor and Kaitlyn Reagan's boys, Seth, as an adult. My state to write about was Illinois, so Seth and Lilly meet in Chicago, but eventually end up in Clear Creek, Kansas.

Here's the story line for Lilly: Bride of Illinois.

A clean, sweet historical romance set in 1890. Lilly Lind was forced to emigrate from Sweden two years ago, due to circumstances beyond her control. She finds a job as a garment maker in the Brown Textile Mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, finally feeling as though she is settling in her new country. Then a suspicious fire burns the mill, making Lilly seek another way to survive. She answers a mail–order bride ad in the Grooms’ Gazette and sets off for Chicago, believing she will be a business owner’s wife.

Kansas rancher Seth Reagan travels to the Union Stockyards in Chicago to attend the 1890 American Fat Stock Show, the American Horse Show, and to purchase horseflesh to augment his herd. When arriving at the train station, he overhears a conversation between a young woman and a shady–looking man. Seth becomes concerned for the mail–order bride who is whisked away to a saloon, not to her new husband’s home.

When Seth goes to the saloon to check on the young woman, he finds her in trouble and offers to help her escape. While buying horses and arranging their return travel to Kansas, Seth realizes he would like to bring Lilly home with him, too, but she is still being hunted by the saloon owner’s thugs.

Lilly’s good fortune in meeting Seth makes her want to start a life with this man, but he came to Illinois for horses, not a bride. Would he want her after he learns of her secrets?

 Read about the whole series

I had a blast working with this group of authors and I think we put out a great series. Each book is so different from the other, ranging for western romance to a Victorian, depending on which state the book is featured in. Please go to the American Mail-Order Bride Series website for the complete list of all fifty books available for your reading enjoyment.

Thanks for stopping by to enjoy today's Sweethearts of the West blog.

Linda Hubalek

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The Merrie Monarch ~Tanya Hanson

Last spring, The Wild Rose Press asked me to participate in a multi-author Christmas series based on

The Twelve Days of Christmas. I got Four Calling Birds. Happens I was in Oahu relaxing at my sis’s when I got The Inspiration for The Christmas Room.

I’d set my western historical holiday romance right there! In Honolulu.

What? How was that gonna work?

Despite Hawaii’s great “paniolo” (cowboy and ranching) culture, I went with an American cowboy, from the Lake Tahoe area. Rooney Lind sails the Pacific on a quest to fulfill a deathbed promise. He’s vowed to find the woman his late cousin wronged long ago in California. Well, of course heroine Martita Akala turns out to be who Rooney’s own heart has been looking for all along.

Anyway, on our trip, we visited the Iolani Palace, built by King David Kalakaua in 1883. It’s only royal palace on American soil.

Although King Kalakaua was courtly in demeanor and fashionable in European styles, he returned to the Hawaiian peoples many of the cultural practices forcibly quashed by American missionaries, such as hula, the Hawaiian language, and luau. (Amazingly, lei-making had never been eliminated.)

Highly-educated and modern thinking, he installed flush plumbing and electric lighting in his palace three years before the White House. And he made sure Honolulu had street lights. 

These facts helped me set the story in December 1890.

Sadly, Kalakaua died just a month later.

You may have heard of the great Kamehameha line of Hawaiian royalty. Well, it had died out, but David was descended from favored court supporters. Another plus...his mother’s ancestors included great Kona chieftains. After serving in King Kamehamea 1V’s legislature for 13 years, Kalakaua won the election over dowager queen Emma in 1874.

He is the first reigning monarch ever to visit the United States. His 1881 world tour saw him meet many heads of state. In 1887, he sent both his sister and his wife, Queen Kapiolani, to London as his representatives at Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee.

While the sugar business in Hawaii flourished, unfortunately so did corruption. British and American business interests wanted more control, and Kalakaua was forced from power in 1887. He remained nothing but a figurehead after forcibly signing “The Bayonet Constitution.”

He and Kapiolani did not have children, so he named his sister Lili ‘uokalani as his heir and regent. (Her story is powerful and tragic. I’ll tell about her, and more about the Iolani Palace, next time.)

photo by D. Ramey Logan 2011. Used with permission

After a devastating legislative session in 1890, King David Kalakaua sailed to San Francisco to regain his health and spirit. However, he died there, on January 1891, ironically at the Palace Hotel. The last reigning king of Hawaii, today he is feted as The Merrie Monarch.

Honestly, the history of the kingdom of Hawaii is as tragic as the mainland's treatment of our First Nations. 

Excerpt:

“Oh, so cold,” he moaned now. “Blizzard. Oh, the wind So cold...”

“No blizzard. Nothing but the tradewinds, cowboy.” She touched his cheek, reckoning him in shock. Worry pounded through her veins. She could cook him a good meal, but she wasn’t a nurse. She relaxed a little. Nalani would know. Squeezing water from a rag in a nearby bowl, Martita dabbed his cheeks with the cool cloth.

“Cowboy?” Like her gesture was an electric shock, he tossed her hands away. His lids popped open. Staring at her--eyes dark blue as a midnight without stars. “What happened? Where am I?”

“You had... an accident.” She shuddered, recalled his arm hanging from its socket. Like an undone button at the end of a long thread.

“Eh?”

“You...you got knocked from your horse in the surf,” she told him. “Getting your beeves to the steamer.” Honolulu had no deep water wharf. Paniolo had to tie cows by the head to the gunwales of small longboats and drag them through the water to load them to larger boats and steam ships.

Confusion wrinkled his brow. “What?

“Your arm got caught in the reins.” She wiped his face gently. “The waves knocked you both about pretty hard. But Doc Howe says he got your arm set back into your shoulder socket correctly."

“Where...where am I?”

“My boarding house. Honolulu,” she added, just in case. “You’ll be sore for a while, and you need rest and quiet. Your foreman paid my rate to have you rest here a few days.”

“A few days?” He paled, groaned, struggled to sit. “I got a job. I got things to do.”

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