Guest Jessi Gage

Today I'm so excited to welcome Jessi Gage, whose novel Wishing for a Highlander is on the Goodreads Best Highland/Scotland Romance Novels list (number 35 last I checked)...which is well-deserved, yet so amazing. She's up there with Diana Gabaldon (who has like 12 of the top 30, LOL), and Julie Garwood.

I truly loved Wishing for a Highlander...and that's even after I edited it. And yes, I'm totally owning that. I "found" Jessi last year when I took pitches at Word Wranglers. Asked to read her synopsis, then needed the full, and fell absolutely in loooooove with Darcy. He's very yummy, and strong, and...vulnerable. Fabulous combination. I'll confess, often when I take on a book to edit, I'm feeling a little "meh" about it. But not with this one.

Anyway. I'll let Jessi get to her guest post:

Is that a stick shift under your kilt, or are you just happy to see me?

Thanks so much for having me, Piper. I'm so excited to be here promoting WISHING FOR A HIGHLANDER, out now with Lyrical Press!

I've been hitting the blogs talking about the research I've done to help make WISHING FOR A HIGHLANDER historically accurate and super fun. One of my favorite bits of research involved working out how a sixteenth-century Scot might manage a modern-day car.

Darcy is the 6'7" kitled hero of WISHING FOR A HIGHLANDER, and he is hotter than a piston firing at full power. He operates the windmills that make his home village profitable, he is the best warrior in his clan due to his looong reach, and he is a virgin who thinks he is too big under his kilt to ever be intimate with a woman.

As you may have guessed from the title of this post, Darcy's adventures in trying to help his wife return to her home in the future land him the driver's seat of a modern-day car. He must figure out how to drive the contraption before an angry mob sets fire to it and kills him and the friends he has made in Inverness, a gypsy and an albino with magical blood.

I started out with the car being a manual transmission, thinking, Darcy runs windmills all day. He'd be fascinated by gears, and he'd have an intuitive understanding of how to shift once he gave it some thought. Unfortunately, when I ran what I had in mind past some gearheads, they looked dubious. They seemed to think I was putting too much faith in my hero (is that even possible in a romance novel?). After much thought, I made the car an automatic, and I'm glad I did, because poor Darcy has enough going on in that scene without having to manage a clutch.

I hope you'll check out WISHING FOR A HIGHLANDER, if for no other reason than to see a sixteenth-century Scot manage a modern-day car. But I promise, there are plenty of other reasons, including the fact that it's half price at Lyrical all month! Here's the blurb for WISHING FOR A HIGHLANDER:

While examining Andrew Carnegie’s lucky rosewood box, single-and-pregnant museum worker Melanie makes a tongue in cheek wish on the artifact--for a Highland warrior to help her forget about her cheating ex. Suddenly transported to the middle of a clan skirmish in sixteenth-century Scotland, she realizes she should have been a tad more specific.

Darcy, laird in waiting, should be the most eligible bachelor in Ackergill, but a cruel prank played on him in his teenage years has led him to believe he is too large under his kilt to ever join with a woman. He has committed himself to a life of bachelorhood, running his deceased father's windmills and keeping up the family manor house...alone.

Darcy's uncle, Laird Steafan welcomes the strangely dressed woman into his clan, immediately marrying her to Darcy in hopes of an heir. But when Steafan learns of her magic box and brands her a witch, Darcy must do what any good husband would--protect his wife, even if it means forsaking his clan.

WARNING: A pregnant museum worker, a sixteenth-century Scot, and a meddlesome wishing box.

Excerpt from WISHING FOR A HIGHLANDER:

Size might have its advantages when it came to fighting, but those few boons fell far short of making up for the problems it caused. Being the biggest and the strongest had gotten him into far more trouble than it had gotten him out of. Swallowing his regret for how careless he’d been with her, he sought to determine whom she belonged to, whom, saints forbid, he might owe.

“Whose wife are ye, then? Not a Gunn’s or I wouldna have had to rescue you from one.”

“I’m not married,” the lass said. “And thank you for the rescuing, by the way. I can’t believe I dropped the dirk. Stupid.” She shook her head.

His heart warmed at her thanks. He didn’t hear many kind words from the lasses and would take what he could get, even from a dishonored woman who had caught a bairn out wedlock. Oddly, he didn’t think poorly of her. Whether it was her worried brow, her guileless, soft mouth, or her vulnerable size, he had not the heart to condemn her.

He didn’t even mind so much that she found him distasteful for his size, although talking with her now, she didn’t seem overly upset to be in his arms. He endeavored to keep her talking, keep her distracted from her disgust.

“Ye never answered my first question,” he said. “Who are you? And where are ye from if ye’re no’ English?”

“Ugh. I don’t know. Is there an answer that won’t get me burned at the stake or locked up in a ward for the hopelessly insane?”

Like most things out of her mouth, that had been a peculiar answer. “Ye could try the truth,” he offered, slowing his pace since he heard Archie’s voice not far off.

“No,” she said flatly. “I couldn’t. At least not the whole truth. How about we just go with my name, Melanie, and with the honest fact that I’m a long way from home and I have no idea how to get back.” Her green eyes pierced his. “I’m afraid you might be stuck with me, Darcy Keith.”

Thanks again for having me Piper! It's been a pleasure working with you on my first romance novel More details on WISHING FOR A HIGHLANDER and on the blog hops I'm participating in (prizes, people!) can be found on my blog and website.

Buy links:

Lyrical Press

Amazon

Barnes N Noble

Follow Jessi Gage on Twitter

Jessi Gage Bio

Jessi lives with her husband and children in the Seattle area. In addition to writing paranormal romance, she’s a wife, a mom, an audiologist, a church-goer, a Ford driver, a PC user, and a coffee snob. Her guiding tenet in her writing is that good triumphs over evil, but not before evil gives good one heck of a run for its money. The last time she imagined a world without romance novels, her husband found her crouched in the corner, rocking.