Consumed by Fire: 1

Evangeline Morrissey remembers the last time she saw her husband: it was during their honeymoon, right before he stole her elderly aunt's earrings and abandoned her. Now, five years later, the enigmatic man who’d broken her heart and destroyed her trust is back. But she’s not the same naive young woman who fell for him so easily.

Marrying Evangeline and letting her think he was nothing but a common thief had been James Bishop’s plan all along. As an assassin for the Committee, a covert agency dedicated to stamping out international crime, he had no business even thinking about marriage. But it was the only way to protect Evangeline after she’d unwittingly wandered into his operation against a group of human traffickers, placing herself in grave danger. And now that James’s vigilant watch over Evangeline’s life has revealed to his enemies that she’s his one true weakness, he must set out to have, to hold, and―above all―to protect his bride.

Anne Stuart is a grand master of the genre, a winner of Romance Writers of America’s prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award, and a survivor of more than forty years in the romance business. And she still just keeps getting better. Her first novel was Barrett’s Hill, a gothic romance published by Ballantine in 1974, when Anne had just turned twenty-five. Since then, she’s written more gothics, Regencies, romantic suspense, romantic adventure, series romance, suspense, historical romance, paranormal, and mainstream contemporary romance.

She’s won numerous awards and appeared on most bestseller lists, and she speaks all over the country. Her general outrageousness has gotten her on Entertainment Tonight, as well as in Vogue, People, USA Today, Woman’s Day, and countless other national newspapers and magazines.

She’s celebrating her fortieth wedding anniversary with her luscious husband, and she lives by a lake in northern Vermont, where she enjoys an empty nest, fabulous grandchildren, and overacting in local theater. She has so many books she still wants to write that she plans to live forever.