Ramey Sandeley, the central male character in The House on Black Lake, has lived his life controlling his environment. He brands his animals with his own tools, runs worldwide entrepreneurial pursuits and his wife and children live by his rules. But Ramey has a lesson to learn. Although that was not his intent when he made plans for Alexandra’s visit.

Men have forgotten this truth. But you must not. You are responsible forever for what you tame.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Alexandra Brighton first takes the eyes of Ramey Sandeley she is newly married and believes she is in love with her husband. She has been taught to accept a superficial concept of what love means, and her husband,Matthew Brighton, has the perfect pedigree. He is highly attractive, successful, well educated, and offers all the worldly goods one could desire. Yet, when she looks into the eyes of Ramey, she feels a dormant part of herself come alive, and nothing matters except the wild brilliance of this feeling. Ramey is also wildly handsome, successful, and newlywed. But there is a vast difference between the two. At their first meeting something both terrible and wonderful happens.

 
For the first time in her life, Alexandra comes viciously alive and experiences an explosive desires to run away with this stranger and free herself of the material world.   She's seized by fantasies of riding with him on a winged Pegasus or flying carpet to a world devoid of society - where there are only the two, nature, and nothing else but candlelight, moonlight, bonfires, forbidden writings, crashing waves, thunder, chilling rain, strange bazaars, burning sands, exotic plains, skin on skin, dangerous animals, bareback rides, swinging through trees, danger, inside and out.

 
In a startling flash, she realizes she is daily judged and heavily reined in by the world around her and nearly owned by a husband who is more master than equal lover. It's now infinitely clear she doesn't even know her husband, let alone understand the nature of his soul. Yet Ramey speaks to her without words - and those unspoken words are powerful. Alexandra has found a true love for her lost soul, but the possibility of their union cannot be achieved until she has claimed the right to this kind of love. And, this will involve many years of great hardship, trials and sorrow.

 
True Love comes unexpected and unbidden, and when it strikes it  both destroys and creates. It will not be denied. For those who settle for less there is no journey. For those who are bestowed the gift and choose to follow, there is a heavy price to pay. It will be nearly thirteen years before Alexandra once again lays eyes on the man who destroyed what she believed an idyllic life, and awakened the brutality of  true love.  Her days on Black Lake will further peal away the layers of her encased soul to release the divinely idyllic within - the spot where True Love unites. 

Anastasia Blackwell