The Wicked Duke Takes a Wife

Jillian Hunter is the author of twenty-one published novels. Her books have been printed in twelve languages and have appeared on the New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. I was born in Scotland where I spent my earliest years in a three-story late Georgian house that my grandmother had bought as a home to rehabilitate Allied soldiers after World War II. She was an amazing woman who had worked for the Free French and as an emergency nurse in her native Wales during the Blitz. She once threw an incendiary bomb that had landed in her parlour out the window while her family slept. Sometimes we lived above the winding staircase of her Scottish house. Sometimes we lived in the servants’ quarters below where I helped the housemaids and worked an ingenious device known as a dumb waiter. My mother had left school at fourteen to work as a switchboard operator in Wales during the war. Years later at a dance in Scotland a handsome blue-eyed American fell down a flight of stairs at her feet. He proposed to her that night. My father was an Intelligence and Executive Officer to the Senior Coast Guard Office Europe. We moved to London when I started school. I didn’t realize it at the time, but he was a writer, too. While I was playing with the hedgehog and fairies in our garden, and reading, always reading, he was writing the book on maritime law in Geneva and at the Hague. He set precedent that is followed today. Eventually we left London to live in America. Later in life I planned to return to London and become a Shakespearean actress. But then one fateful Friday the thirteenth I met a bass player in a band. He quoted to me from The Taming of the Shrew. His nickname was Beast. Over 25 years, a BA in French, three daughters, and twenty-one books later, I am still married to the man I tamed.