The Maiden Bride: A Castle Keep Romance

Rampant Inflation... Labor Shortages... Families in Crisis...~the year is 1351!From USA Today Best Selling Author, Linda Needham: THE MAIDEN BRIDE (A Castle Keep Romance) Refreshed and Expanded and ready to melt your heart."The quintessential tale of a knight, heart-wounded, who searches for his own personal holy grail, and finds that it was always within his reach. This is what I read romances for!" ~ JM, Heartland CritiquesMARRIED BY PROXYWith the world in chaos in the aftermath of the Black Death, the widowed Lady Eleanor arrives at her husband's tattered and deserted castle, determined to make a home for the trio of orphans she has adopted on her journey, as well as for any other straggler who needs to start their lives afresh.
As she explores the battered keep, a huge shadow overtakes her in the darkness-a gargoyle made flesh, commanding her to leave or pay the consequences. Unaware that the beast is the ruthless, black-hearted war lord whom she married by proxy before the Great Pestilence, but had never met, Eleanor steels her courage, claims her legal dower rights to the castle as the widow of William Bayard, the late lord of Faulkhurst, and demands that he either stay and help her restore that castle, or leave immediately.
WIDOWED IN HASTENicholas Bayard is stunned to discover the virginal bride he thought had perished in the plague is very much alive, and more beautiful than he could ever have imagined. Not that he could allow such a thought to matter. Believing himself cursed by God and damned for his life of war and infamy, he conceals his true identity from his wife and reluctantly agrees to help restore the castle-one final penance for his sins, and then he will leave the world for a solitary, monastic life.
Yet Eleanor is a constant temptation, her hope and determination nearly impossible to resist. Her generous heart and joy in life is as intoxicating to Nicholas as her belief in miracles, and he soon finds himself burning for the woman he cannot have, for the love he doesn't deserve. But when Eleanor follows the clues that lead to Nicholas's true identity, she falls in love with the remarkable and selfless man her husband has become, and proves to him that love is the greatest miracle of all.