Aching for Always

What do you do when your journey seems to have been mapped out for you since birth? Follow it, or follow your instincts? Joss O'Malley and Hugh Hawksmoor, products of two different upbringings in two very different worlds will have to find out. Smart, brunette and directed, Joss O'Malleycame from centuries-old wealth, but after her cold and distant father squandered the family fortune, she's seen only one path for herself: keeping her beloved mother's small map-making company and its thirty-two employees afloat. She thinks she's found her white knight in Rogan Reynolds, the whiz-kid entrepreneur who's the darling of the venture capital world. But when Hugh Hawksmoor, the dark, handsome, self-made navy captain from eighteenth-century London, bursts into her life, sparks fly. Little does she know, however, that Hugh's motivations run deeper than simple attraction. He has sworn to avenge his brother's murder three hundred years ago at the hands of a man who figured out how to change the past for his own profit--Joss's father, Alfred Brand. Joss' company possesses the map that will reverse the changes Brand wrought, and Hugh will do whatever it takes to return it to its rightful place. Hugh forces Joss on a dangerous journey to the past that takes them from a remote islet in the north Atlantic to a raging river in the wilds of Exmoor to Hugh's rooms in London and, finally, to a heated liaison on the grounds of Lord Quarley's estate, where Joss learns she's risked more than her heart and Hugh discovers that the path to redemption lay in the terrifying uncharted territory of love and forgiveness.