Attorney Sharon Beckett worked hard to lift her life out of the gutter. Her shameful scandalous past keeps her out of the limelight and firmly on the side of the establishment. And nothing else. In her mind, a pro-bono case for a skid row non-profit is the opposite of career advancement, but she’ll do what she must to climb that last corporate rung.
Passionate and angry social worker Kent Sawyer is determined to save troubled street kids by opening a much-needed shelter. But getting development approval depends on forging an unlikely alliance with a beautiful cold-hearted ice princess. Scandal-averse Sharon, assigned to Kent’s project, could take on corrupt city officials and greedy developers to help him succeed, but she won’t. Until secrets from her past surface, and a dark turn of events forces her hand.
Can Sharon and Kent put their differences aside and learn to work together for the greater good, or will Kent’s dreams of righting the past by brightening the future implode before they even break ground?
Before You Knew Me is a full length stand alone novel and can be read independently of other books in the Having It All series.
USA Today Best-selling author MaryAnn Clarke is a Chatelaine Grand Prize winner and Next Generation Indie Book Award finalist for The Art of Enchantment, first in the Life is a Journey series about young women on journeys abroad who discover themselves and fall in love while getting embroiled in someone else’s problems. Her Having it All series is about professional women struggling to balance the challenge and fulfillment of their careers with their search for identity, love, family and home. The first book in her newest small town steamy romance series, The Reporter’s UNLIKELY Reunion, won runner up in the 2024 Indie Writer’s Project Contest.
Always eager to fill blank pages and empty canvases with ideas swirling in her head, MaryAnn set out to write emotionally engaging stories that walk a tight rope between intelligent Women’s Fiction and heart-warming Romance.
A polymath who studied Fine Arts, Urbanism, Architecture and Gerontology at university on both coasts of Canada, she turned to her first love, writing stories, when she realized she could have more fun with fewer rules as an author, than working in an office as an architect, or in a university as a researcher. When not writing, she meditates while hiking wooded mountain trails, does yoga and Pilates to fend off decrepitude, reads eclectically, contemplates wormholes, experiments with painting abstract expressionism, kills plants and tries not to burn dinner while solving her next plot problem. Now that her chick has flown the coop, Clarke lives on beautiful Vancouver Island, Canada with her husband and cats. Although she knows she lives in Paradise, she still loves traveling the world in search of romance, art, good food and new story inspiration.