When I was 14 my family moved from rural Utah to Las Vegas NV. For a girl who’d spent her entire life with the exact same group of people, this was more than culture shock. It was the first time I experienced depression. I went having a core group of friends, and my family around to a whole new culture. I was lost.
Growing up we had the book mobile which would come out to where I lived twice a month and my mom and grandma’s instilled in me a love of reading. So when I discovered the little satellite library around the corner from my new house it was like reclaiming a piece of what I’d lost in the move.
I quickly read through all of the YA books they had, not that there were a lot back then. The Babysitters Club, Sweet Valley, The Boxcar Children.
I even read all of the works of Shakespeare they had.
Then I discovered the Gothic romances of Victoria Holt. I read all of them too.
All in one summer.
After that I would comb the library shelves for something. It was then that I discovered Brave the Wild Wind by Johanna Lindsey. It was the cover that drew me in. I had never seen anything like it. Then I read it. And it blew my freaking mind.
I grew up in a very conservative Christian church where we didn’t talk about sex. Especially the kind of sex that happened in that book.
So I glommed that book. There was something about Jesse and Chase that sucked me in. I loved everything about it. I loved it so much that I asked the librarian to see if there were any more books by her in the main library. There were.
With school in I couldn’t read as much so over the next year I read all of her back list the library had. Every babysitting dollar I earned went to buying her books. Her’s and Julie Garwood’s.
I learned a lot about me, about love and sex reading her. She forever changed how I looked at the world and what I read. Over the years I’ve read other genres, but romance has always remained my go to. And it was due to Johanna Lindsey. I have read every book she’s written, some I’ve loved, some I’ve liked and others I’ve read only because they were written by her.
She may never know the impact she had on me, and countless other readers. She will be missed.
In honor of here. these are my top favorite books by her.
As wild as the Wyoming frontier and a terror when spurned, Jessie Blair is furious when she over hears Chase Summers refusing her hand and vows to seduce the handsome drifter out of spite.
Enraged by Jessie’s arrogance yet haunted by her beauty, Chase is irresistibly drawn to the headstrong miss — and into her troubles with the land-hungry villains who murdered her father. For his pride insists he tame the fiery temptress who toys with his emotions. And his passion won’t be sated until the sensuous young hellion becomes a woman in his arms.
A Touch Of Hell
Hoping to cool off a twenty-five year-old feud between two neighboring families, Cassie Stuart only succeeds in pouring kerosene on the flames.Both sides have warned her to get out of Texas pronto…or they will burn her father’s ranch to the ground. What Cassie needs is a peacemaker–but she ends up with a widow-maker instead.
A Taste Of Heaven
He is called Angel – a ruggedly handsome hired gun with eyes as black as sin. Unwanted and unwelcomed by his ungrateful employer, he would just as soon leave Cassie to fend for herself. But a stubborn sense of duty – and a desire to taste the sweetness of her kiss – steels Angel’s resolve to make Cassie want him, come hell or high water…and for more than his gun alone.
Kristen Haardrad met the icy fury in her captor’s crystal-green gaze with defiance. She was the prisoner of Royce of Wyndhurst, but his slave she’d never be. This powerful Saxon lord had at last met his match in the Viking beauty – his equal in pride, in strength…and in the fierce, hot hunger of insatiable desire. But Kristen could not know the torment that divided his soul; how he ached to hold her soft, supple body, thirsted for the ringing joy of her laughter – yet hated her for an ancient crime that was not her own.
But her golden loveliness drives him mad with desire, her fiery eyes taunting him, compelling him to claim her. Until, in wordless surrender, they cast aside the shackles of doubt and distrust to unite forever in the searing promise of all-consuming love.
In the year 2139, fearless Tedra De Arr sets out to rescue her beleaguered planet Kystran from the savage rule of the evil Crad Ce Moerr.
Experienced in combat but not in love, the beautiful, untouched Amazon flies with Martha, her wise-cracking, free-thinking computer, to a world where warriors reign supreme – and into the arms of the one man she can never hope to vanquish: the bronzed barbarian Challen Ly-San-Ter.
A magnificent creature of raw yet disciplined desires, the muscle-bound primitive succeeds where no puny Kystran male had before – igniting a raging fire within Tedra that must be extinguished before she can even think of saving her enslaved world…
Reina seethes with rage over her fate: taken captive by the knight Ranulf — a golden giant of a man — who has pledged to deliver her to the nuptial bed of the despised Lord Rothwell. She will never accept such bondage — and Reina offers herself to her kidnapped instead, offering to make Ranulf a great lord…if he agrees to wed her.
But the brave knight desires much more than a marriage of convenience from this proud, headstrong lady who treats him with scorn yet makes his blood run hotter than liquid fire. She must come to him of her own free will — or Ranulf will take her. For the passion that consumes them both cannot long be denied — even though gravest peril surely awaits them on the heart’s trail to a destines and turbulent love.
Wildly unpredictable, the most desirable beauty in the land, Megan Penworthy has set her amorous sights on Ambrose St. James, a man she has never met but has every intention of marrying. And no other suitor will satisfy her especially not the common, if uncommonly handsome, horse breeder, Devlin Jefferys.
Posing as lowborn Jefferys to escape a potentially fatal confrontation, Sir Ambrose is enthralled by the brazen, duke-hunting redhead. Without revealing his true identity, he vows to seduce and tame her, thereby foiling Megan’s plans to marry the man of her dreams. But the notorious rogue never imagined the enchanting schemer would turn out to be the only woman he would ever dream of marrying.
As the entire Malory family gathers at Haverston to celebrate the season, a mysterious present arrives anonymously. The gift is an old journal — a tender and tempestuous account of the love affair between the second Marquis, Christopher Malory, and a dark gypsy beauty named Anastasia, who seeks a love match with a non-gypsy in order to save herself from a prearranged marriage to a brute. Though the dashing English lord Anastasia sets her sight upon burns for the exquisite, exotic miss, Christopher could never consent to wed such a lowborn lady. But miracles have been known to happen in this season of peace and giving and love, as two extraordinary people separated by circumstance of birth begin a passionate dance of will and wiles. And in the miraculous blossoming of a glorious romance at a long ago Christmastime, there are wise and well-learned lessons that will enrich the hearts of the Malory descendants — and, indeed, of everyone who has ever dreamed.
It was to be a grand adventure for Melissa MacGregor — an escape from the wilds of her Scottish home into the whirl of the London social season, and far from the stifling protectiveness of her mother’s sixteen strapping, somewhat bumbling brothers, six of whom are named Ian. There the bewitching lass is sure to find a suitable husband who will not be intimidated by her suspicious uncles and who is more appealing than the many local suitors whom her uncles have already deemed unworthy. But before she begins her pursuit of a new life, Melissa is distracted by an intriguing gentleman stranger she encounters on her grandfather’s lands.
Lincoln Ross Burnett is no stranger to Scotland, however. The seventeenth Viscount Cambury, Lincoln once called this fair land home — until as a boy of twelve he was sent away to live with relatives in London after his father’s death. To stay would surely have meant his own demise, for a bitter feud was raging around him, marking young Lincoln as a target of a brutal gang of “savages” who went by the name MacFearsons.
Now as he restlessly roams the countryside he so loved as a child, Lincoln can feel the anger and bitterness returning — only to be dispelled by the beauty of the lady who stands before him. Though they part after but a few spoken words, the damage has been done: Lincoln’s heart has been claimed forever, and he will never be complete again until Melissa MacGregor is his bride.
Though destiny is carrying them along separate paths, Lincoln knows he will pursue Melissa to London … and to the ends of the earth, if necessary. But ties of blood and duty have made his heart’s obsession with the enchanting beauty not only desperate but quite dangerous. For the woman Lincoln must have is the niece of those who, even now, are sworn to his destruction, and who are willing to dog his every step, even following two yearning souls fated to be lovers into the glittering world of the London ton. The longtime feud is raging hotter than ever before — and even the irresistible shared passion of Lincoln and Melissa may not be powerful enough to withstand its devastating fire.
As wild and reckless as the most incorrigible of her male cousins, Amy Malory has reached a marriageable age and has set her sights on a most inappropriate mate: the straight-laced American ship captain who once nearly had her Uncle James hung hanged for piracy.
Warren Anderson is shocked by the brazen advances of his despised enemy’s beautiful niece. Though determined to resist her, he burns for the enchanting British minx. And an impassioned heart implores him to surrender to a love that could stoke the smoldering fires of a family feud into a dangerous, all consuming blaze.
CAPTIVE OF LOVE
Spirited Rowena Belleme must produce an heir–or incur the dangerous wrath of a ruthless stepbrother, who stands to forfeit his ill-gotten wealth. And the magnificent Warrick deChaville is the perfect choice to sire her child–though it means imprisoning the handsome knight…and forcing him to bend to her amorous whims.
SLAVE OF PASSION
Vowing to resist but betrayed by his own virility, noble Warrick is intoxicated by Rowena’s sapphire eyes and voluptuous beauty. Yet all the while he plans a fitting revenge–eagerly awaiting the time when his sensuous captor becomes his helpless captive … and is made to suffer the same rapturous torment and exquisite ecstasy that he himself has endured.
Kidnapped and sold into slavery, Chantelle Burke was led into the Pasha’s scented chambers swearing she’d never surrender to this ruthless master. But she was stunned by the magnificently handsome man who awaited her amid the silk and splendor. His piercing emerald eyes held her in their power; his muscular embrace made her weak with desire even as she defied him. She was his to do with as he would. Yet this mysterious stranger – whose eastern garb concealed his true identity – touched her only with tenderness, driving her wild with new sensation, his scorching kisses igniting the fires of her very soul… and sweeping her beyond the harem walls into a palace of love’s eternal dream.
