Recovering from shattered marriage plans, Annette Bodin, an attractive thirty-year-old music instructor at Newbury College in Louisiana, inherits a Thoroughbred breeding farm and its resident stallion from a horseman father she had never known. She's told the potential value of the stallion could be in the millions of dollars or virtually nothing. It depends on how well his first crop-of-runners does on the racetrack this coming racing season. Annette obtains a semester's sabbatical leave from her school and moves to the farm to take on the challenge. In the process, she falls in love with a young, handsome trainer with a stake in her stallion's success. Setbacks occur with her racehorses and in her love affair that cause her to face some tough decisions.Gerald Lurie has always wanted to be a creative writer. At a community college, he worked on the school paper as sports editor. During his military service, he was executive editor of the Fifth Army Headquarters news sheet: The Ranger. At Northwestern University, where he graduated with a B.A. in history, he wrote "tons of non-fiction papers." In recent years, at a local creative writer's group, he finally fulfilled his wish to learn the tools of fiction writing. His experience as an owner, trainer, and breeder of Thoroughbreds, led him to write his novel, Royal Bloodlines. A licensed single-engine airplane pilot, he's also an avid boater, fisherman, and scuba diver. He and his family, all certified scuba divers, currently reside in south Florida, "as close to the ocean as we can get."