Dear Friends, The day has come! Timeless Desire is out! Well, at least the e-book is. The paper version is coming next week. I’m totally in love with this wraparound cover! (Though how they get the wind to blow in both directions at the same time, I don’t know.) No matter your e-reader format, you can find one-stop shopping for the book here . And for a summary of the story, look here.

I am sitting here on launch day, contemplating the joys of a great library. There are two in Timeless Desire—one is the Carnegie Library in Carnegie, Pa, just a few miles from my house. That’s where the heroine, Panna, works. She’s a young widow and a kick-ass librarian, struggling to keep the library going in the face of budget cuts. A hundred and ten years ago, Carnegie, Pa, was originally two towns—Chartiers and Mansfield. Chartiers and Mansfield banded together to ask Andrew Carnegie to give them a library. To sweeten the pot, they offered to merge and change their name to Carnegie if he did. He did, and the library with its music hall still stands. Here it is below.

It is mostly as I describe it in the book, except for one key particular: There is no larger-than-life statue of the oh-so-handsome English war hero and nobleman that looms over Panna’s desk. This is the statue that inspired me. It’s of Polish and American Revolutionary war hero, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, and it stands in the heart of downtown Philadelphia. Isn’t he dreamy?

The second library is the library of the English war hero and nobleman. You see Panna finds a secret passageway in the library behind a long-locked door, which leads her—ta da!—into the nobleman’s opulent personal library. I used the J.P. Morgan library in New York, a breath-taking example of the power of money, as the inspiration for that. Check it out below.

But the war hero isn’t quite the man Panna expected. He has secrets he wants to keep (and his library holds a few secrets as well. They clash at first, as all good romance characters do, but chasing an adventure across half of northern England and southern Scotland, they find themselves falling desperately in love. If you haven’t read it already, please do. I know you’ll like it. Contest We’ll run a shoe-related contest next week, when the paper version of the book comes out, but until then, you can win a copy of Timeless Desire. There are three ways to win (and three copies I’ll be giving away): Enter your email address here by July 31; Friend me on Facebook by July 31; or Follow me on Twitter by July 31 If you're already a fan on Facebook or you already follow me on Twitter, rest easy. You're already entered to win. Best, Gwyn

old.cready.com gwyn@cready.com Gwyn Cready , Romance Novelist on Facebook @GwynCready on Twitter Copyright©2012 Gwyn Cready. All rights reserved. Author photos copyright ©2012 Garen DiBartolomeo. Website design by avoCreative. Illustrations of author courtesy of Design-Her-Gals.