The Calling (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780578728322)

Kerry leaned forward, a serious expression stealing over her face. "Something told you? You mean like a calling sort of thing?"

How much does fate work in our lives? How much do our ancestral roots determine who we are?

Kerry Carter is on a mission to answer these questions. Prompted by her late father's unfinished research of lost family history, the

young Social Studies teacher takes a year of absence to travel to England. It a dual-purpose trip: to gather classroom material for her focus on English culture and to search out her own bloodline.

Kerry's friends are skeptical, as Kerry has never traveled outside North Carolina. She's also known to be a bit of a klutz, both physically and socially. But Kerry is determined. She feels compelled, as if an important purpose is calling her from across the ocean.

Kerry's search leads her to wild and beautiful Cornwall, whose eighteenth-century history is ripe with smuggling and piracy. Could this dark and daring history be hers by way of her ancestors?

Along the way Kerry's strengths and weaknesses are tested, and this leads her to a deeper sense of self-awareness. She also finds friendships, adventure, intrigue...and Merrek Walles, a darkly handsome young Cornishman with an old soul. Their first encounter sparks a recognition of sorts, and their relationship quickly deepens. Together they uncover a two-hundred-year-old mystery and make an ancestral discovery that binds them even more.

But will history repeat itself and tear Kerry away from the man she loves and the family roots and homeland she has finally found?