Becky Lower

Becky Lower builds historical romances around courtship during periods of social and geographic change. Her Cotillion Ball Saga follows members of the Fitzpatrick family in nineteenth-century New York before and during the Civil War. Expressly Yours, Samantha, released in 2015, is the seventh book in that sequence. It pairs Samantha Hughes, who disguises herself as a man to ride for the Pony Express, with Valerian Fitzpatrick, who joins the service while seeking independence from his family's business. The Western setting extends the saga beyond ballrooms and established society, using travel, concealed identity, and the risks of frontier communication to shape the relationship. Lower has also written Regency and contemporary romance, and her books repeatedly draw on American settings researched through travel. Within the Cotillion Ball Saga, Expressly Yours, Samantha advances the family chronology while giving Valerian his own story and making Samantha's resourcefulness the driving force in its Pony Express adventure.