There emerged, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, a reflexive relationship between shifting codes of legal evidence in British courtrooms and the growing fascination throughout Europe with the "primitive" Scottish Highlands. New methods for determining evidential truth, linked with the growing prominence of lawyers and a formalized division of labor between witnesses and jurors, combined to devalue the authority of witness testimony, magnifying the rupture between experience and knowledge. Juries now pronounced verdicts based not upon the certainty of direct experience but rather upon abstractions of probability or reasonable likelihood. Yet even as these changes were occurring, the Scottish Highlands and Hebridean Islands were attracting increased attention as a region where witness experience in sublime and communal forms had managed to trump enlightened progress and the probabilistic, abstract, and mediated mentality on which the Enlightenment was predicated. There, in a remote corner of Britain, natives and tourists beheld things that surpassed enlightened understanding; experience was becoming all the more alluring to the extent that it signified something other than knowledge. Matthew Wickman examines this uncanny return of experiential authority at the very moment of its supposed decline and traces the alluring improbability of experience into our own time. Thematic in its focus and cross-disciplinary in its approach, The Ruins of Experience situates the literary next to the nonliterary, the old beside the new. Wickman looks to poems, novels, philosophical texts, travel narratives, contemporary theory, and evidential treatises and trial narratives to suggest an alternative historical view of the paradoxical tensions of the Enlightenment and Romantic eras.

He's a bad bad boy...a man with no heart. Gil Allemand wants to be left alone, especially by the beautiful outcast who's invaded the vineyard where he meant to wallow in his grief. She has a ton of impudence and brazenness, a talent for trouble, and a child who brings back memories better left in the dark recesses of his mind. Yet Jenna's feisty spirit might just be heaven-sent to save a hard, inflexible man. ...she's a desperate young mother. Jenna Bonnet's bad luck has taken a turn she never imagined. With twenty-five silver francs, a mare that can't walk up the hill to the chateau that is her five-year-old son's birthright, a son she is desperate to keep alive, she's come home to a village that despises her. However, this single-minded young widow with a shocking past has learned how to fight. She'll do anything to keep her child alive—even take on a man with no heart.

He is a bad, bad boy… Michael Flannigan has burgeoning ideas the moment he meets the woman who has inherited Mayfair. Clare will fit into his big plans quite nicely. Mayfair Plantation is his heritage. Even before the Revolutionary war Flannigans owned this land. No woman is going take what is his. Realizing the only way he can possess the land that is his birthright is to marry the impulsive woman who waltzes into his life, he sets his sights on making her his, slowly seducing her until she unwittingly falls into his scheme. …but she is determined When Clare Carter-Brown returns to Mayfair Hall in Virginia after several years absence, she intends to claim her inheritance. Bypassing Leslie Hall, she moves into Mayfair without a chaperone intending to take over from the manager. Michael objects to her tactics. At every turn, he adeptly points out her failings. As the fires rage around them they find a love that burns more fiercely than either could ever imagine.

He's a bad bad boy... Link Stewart is an incorrigible rake, a woman's man who knows his way around the bedroom. When he travels to Virginia to solve the mysterious happenings on the Stewart tobacco plantation, he discovers there is more than one mystery that needs to be solved. A beautiful seemingly sophisticated young woman, Sophia Carter-Brown, sets her sights on him. She makes it abundantly clear she wants him for her next lover. ...but she's a desperate woman Sophia has learned about men. She knows them. Has controlled them. When she discovers she cannot control Link, she is terrified. This man is different from every other man she's known. She finds herself out of her element, reeling in self-doubt even afraid for her life. Link, confident as only a carefree, successful rake can be when it comes to understanding women, sets out to teach her who exactly is in charge.

A WHISPER OF PLEASURE Ella Hepburn was an auburn haired debutant from the harsh Scottish coastline—a wild innocent to be seduced and tamed. A spirited beauty, she captivated Drake Montgomerie's jaded heart—while succumbing to the smoldering desire she felt for her unyielding suitor. A WHISPER OF DANGER In Drake Montgomerie's glittering world of money and privilege, young Ella discovered passion and desire could overcome everything she'd been taught to resist—entangling Drake, the heir apparent, in a lethal coil of aristocratic family intrigue. But grave peril would only nurse the sparks of a love that knew no limits and a magnificent ecstasy that would not be denied.

Once she'd been a pampered child with high expectations for her future blessed with love. Then she became an innocent pawn in a terrible game of greed and power. Now, with a noose around her neck, Pippa was to hang before she had the chance to unveil the men who drove her from her home, before she had the chance to live. Roby McKenna was a man blessed with endless charm and wit. While he searched for his eternal love across the Atlantic in a new land, he would have to come home to find her. His silver blue eyes could sparkle with amusement or harden to steel gray with displeasure. He had all the women a man could want or need. As he grew older, mistresses were not enough. A quirk of fate brought him to the gallows, a spark of destiny made him claim the condemned Pippa as his bride.

SHE WOULD RISK EVERYTHING TO BECOME A PRACTICING DOCTOR Annie Lundin’s dream of practicing medicine and a life of dignity and self-sufficiency vanishes in the small Kansas Territory town of Denver City. When the men of the town refuse to become her patients, all she has left to fight for is her practice. She is thwarted from every direction. She didn’t mean to fall for the dark, handsome sheriff. Didn’t mean to ask for his help. Annie needs Deke Sullivan to protect her from the dark secrets that follow her from Boston. In return she offers all she has—herself. HE WOULD STOP AT NOTHING TO WIN HER LOVE AND TRUST Raised by the Cheyenne, Deke Sullivan was churlish, overconfident, and dangerously handsome. His life changed when his Irish grandfather discovered him. He was sent to West Point, fought the Seminole in Florida as well as some on the planes where his loyalty was divided. A woman is the last thing in the world he needs. Especially a woman who belongs in Boston, not the rugged Rocky Mountains. He has commitments that don’t include a woman. The moment he sees Annie her intoxicating beauty changed him forever. Love has a way of changing the rules.