Rose Ravenscroft – författare

She came to steal his clan's most sacred relic. She didn't plan on the blizzard. Or the man.Elara Ashwood is a trained warrior on a mission: infiltrate enemy territory, steal the sacred key that could end a generations-old feud, and return home a hero. Disguised as a traveling herbalist, she's tracked the relic to a remote hunting lodge in the frozen Wildmoor—but a winter storm traps her there with the one man who sees through her lies.Lachlan Thornwood is scarred, solitary, and keeper of the very key Elara seeks. He recognizes her as an Ashwood spy the moment she wakes in his lodge. He should turn her over to his father. Instead, he makes her an offer: stay through the storm, play the game, try to take the key. But if she succeeds, she'll have to kill him—because he will never stop coming for her.What begins as a deadly battle of wits becomes something neither expected. Snowed in together for weeks, their walls crack under shared grief, reluctant respect, and a physical tension that threatens to consume them both. But Elara's mission hasn't changed, Lachaln's loyalty to his clan hasn't wavered, and in these lands, the earth itself keeps score.When the grove demands they either seal their bond or pay in blood, Elara and Lachlan must decide what matters more: the war they were born into, or the love they never saw coming.

The grove was hungry.Aisling felt it in the soles of her bare feet — a slow pulse rising through damp earth and tangled root, a heartbeat not her own. She had served the Bloodroot Grove since girlhood, the way her mother had before her, and her mother before that. She knew what the land wanted. She knew what it had already taken. And when the grove whispered completion and showed her a grey-eyed stranger at its border, she knew something old and terrible was about to be asked of her.Cael of Ashvale was meant to be his father's weapon — a hostage in name, a spy in fact, sent north under a peace-truce to find how the sacred forest his clan had warred against for three generations could finally be broken. He was not meant to fall in love with its keeper. He was not meant to hear the earth speak his name. He was not meant to choose her people over his own.Their love is forbidden in every language they share. Their clans will never forgive it. The grove does not care. It has waited longer than memory for blood freely given — a union to satisfy a hunger older than the first oath ever sworn. What Aisling and Cael offer will end a war. What it costs will bind every descendant who follows them to a grove that will never stop asking, an oath they never chose, and a love that rooted itself into the bones of the world.This is the story that started the Bloodroot legend.The land remembers. The oaths endure.