The wall wanted blood again, and Jonah Vance was running low on places to give it.

Six years he has climbed the pass before sunrise. Six years he has opened his own hand on a standing stone the height of two men — black rock veined pale where his blood has soaked in and dried and soaked in again until the anchor itself has gone the colour of an old bruise.

The ward does not speak. It presses. It tells him the same thing every morning, in the only language it has:

Less than yesterday. Not enough.

He is the wall. That is the whole of his function and the whole of his life, and the scars on his palms wake before he reaches the top of the switchback, and nobody warned him that the cutting is not the part that ruins a man.

The part that ruins a man is being the only thing standing between a country and what is on the other side.

Then the warlord comes through the pass.

Rhys is everything Jonah has bled six years to keep out — and he does not attack. He comes to the anchor. He looks at a man kneeling in the frost with his wrist opened over a stone, and he asks the question nobody in six years has thought to ask:

What happens to you when it takes what it wants?

What follows is a treaty neither side asked for, a ward that will only hold if two enemies kneel at the same stone, and a slow, ruinous discovery — that the man sent to break the wall may be the first person who ever wanted to know what it cost to be one.

There is a captain who wants Jonah bleeding. There is a council that wants the treaty burned. There is a warlord riding south who will come personally when he sees the flag, and he will not come to negotiate.

And there is an anchor in a high saddle that has never once cared whose blood it is.

Some walls are built. Some are people who never learned how to stop.

Slow-burn MM fantasy romance. Enemies to lovers, forced proximity, hurt/comfort, and two men who have each spent their lives being useful to something larger and have never once been asked what it cost.

Standalone. Guaranteed happily-ever-after — no cheating, no cliffhanger, both men alive at the end.

He has been a wall for six years. Someone is finally standing on the other side of it, asking to be let in.

Barbara Cartland was the most prolific and popular romantic author of the Twentieth Century enchanting millions of readers with her unequalled tales of pure romance, dashing heroes, beautiful heroines, and of course, her trademark happy endings.



Now, as a tribute to Her Majesty the Queen on her Diamond Jubilee and to Barbara’s enduring appeal to romantics everywhere, her publishers have launched her past collection - The Eternal Collection.



The collection includes - Elizabethan Lover, The Little Pretender, A Ghost in Monte Carlo and A Duel of Hearts which were all in circulation at the time Queen Elizabeth ascended to the throne in 1952. The books are available at the Kindle Store at Amazon.co.uk – or from Amazon.com.



Ian McCorquodale, Barbara Cartland’s son, said, “My mother would have been so delighted that modern technology can now make her glorious and timeless romances so readily available to new generations of readers all over the world.” weniger anzeigen expand_less