Here’s the set-up for Kathryn Shay’s Ties That Bind, just $3.99 on Kindle:

In her research on the legal system, Kathryn Shay followed lawyers, a public defender and a district attorney through their day and into court.

Reese Bishop would like to think he’s gotten over his ex-wife, Judge Kate Renado, and vice versa. But when they’re thrown together to disprove an accusation by a former clients, who they represented in their high powered law firm, everything between them gets murky.

The facts that they’re both involved with wonderful new partners, their daughter Sofie has barely accepted their divorce, and the totally unexpected cover-up in the prison system can’t quell the explosive attraction and deep love that surfaces when they work to prove their innocence.

Readers will be shocked by the turn of events in this novel.

From the reviewers:

“Shay has crafted a novel with an intriguing premise and, best of all, with two protagonists who unleash tons of conflict in their wake.” — RT Book Reviews

“The book is so readable…Kathryn Shay writes some of the cleanest prose around, and it’s my belief she’d make the Yellow Pages sound interesting if the phone company put her on staff…the story was brisk and kept me reading. And Ms. Shay knows her way around a steamy love scene.” The Romance Reader

“TIES THAT BIND was a compelling story that evoked strong emotions and I…found that I was compelled to turn the pages.” Joyfully Reviewed.

Kathryn Shay is a lifelong writer. At fifteen, she penned her first ‘romance,’ a short story about a female newspaper reporter in New York City and her fight to make a name for herself in a world of male journalists – and with one hardheaded editor in particular. Looking back, Kathryn says she should have known then that writing was in her future. But as so often happens, fate sent her detouring down another path.

Fully intending to pursue her dream of big city lights and success in the literary world, Kathryn took every creative writing class available at the small private women’s college she attended in upstate New York. Instead, other dreams took precedence. She met and subsequently married a wonderful guy who’d attended a neighboring school, then completed her practice teaching, a requirement for the education degree she never intended to use. But says Kathryn, “I fell in love with teaching the first day I was up in front of a class, and knew I was meant to do that.”

Kathryn went on to build a successful career in the New York state school system, thoroughly enjoying her work with adolescents. But by the early 1990s, she’d again made room in her life for writing. It was then that she submitted her first manuscript to publishers and agents. Despite enduring two years of rejections, she persevered. And on a snowy December afternoon in 1994, Kathryn Shay sold her first book to Harlequin Superromance.

Since that first sale, Kathryn has written twenty-two books for Harlequin, ten mainstream contemporary romances for the Berkley Publishing Group, and two online novellas, which Berkley then published in traditional print format.

Kathryn has become known for her powerful characterizations – readers say they feel they know the people in her books – and her heart-wrenching, emotional writing (her favorite comments are that fans cried while reading her books or stayed up late to finish them). In testament to her skill, the author has had a one of her books serialized in the December 2003 COSMOPOLITAN magazine and has been quoted in PEOPLE and THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. She has won five RT BookClub Magazine Reviewers Choice Awards, three Holt Medallions, two Desert Quill Awards, the Golden Leaf Award, and several online accolades.

Even in light of her writing success, that initial love of teaching never wavered for Kathryn. She finished out her teaching career in 2004, retiring from the same school where her career began. These days, she lives in upstate New York with her husband and two children. “My life is very full,” she reports, “but very happy. I consider myself fortunate to have been able to pursue and achieve my dreams.”

And here, in the comfort of your own browser, is your free sample of TIES THAT BIND by Kathryn Shay: