Skin Deep - Doyle, Marissa

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Résumé :
After a painful divorce, Garland Durrell looks forward to settling into her home on Cape Cod to make the quilts that are her passion. On the first morning of her new life she finds a man and a small boy washed up on the beach, both badly wounded. Since the town chief of police is strangely reluctant to help, Garland takes on the care of the mysterious pair who don't seem to remember what happened to them--and feels her own heart begin to heal. Alasdair does remember. He and his son Conn are the last of the ruling family of selkies from the waters around the Cape, locked in a decades-long struggle with an evil that threatens all, selkie and human. He's not sure if he can trust the lovely, blue-eyed woman who takes them in until he touches one of her quilts and feels the magic she's sewn into it...and the emotions that he never thought he'd feel again. But the evil entity that stole Alasdair's sealskin and left him for dead quickly senses both his presence and Garland's magic, and is determined to destroy one and possess the other. Only Garland and her quilts, made with a power she barely believes she has, can save them all from destruction-if she can avoid being destroyed first....

Biographie:
The best-laid plans, even of princesses, can go awry...very, very awry.
Seventeen-year-old Saraid of Thekla is on her way to marry the ruler of far-off Mauburni. But she's not sobbing into her silk-curtained litter at the thought of leaving home, because she has plans-and The Book. She's studied this ancient treatise on the art of kingship for months to make herself the ideal queen for her adopted country. Once her new husband sees that, he'll fall madly in love with her. It will all be perfect. She knows it.
But The Book is silent on what to do when one's journey across a cursed desert wasteland is halted by a mysterious young warlord. Cadel has plans of his own-plans that don't include her going to Mauburni. As she begins to unravel his secrets, Saraid will have to lay aside The Book and trust her own wisdom-and her heart-to navigate the treacherous shoals of politics and power and become the queen she yearns to be.