Born and raised in Wyoming, USA, Cheryl McGonigle took piano lessons as a girl, but gave it all up for the high school speech team — where the boys were as smart as they were cute, and girls dared show off their own intelligence! Early bets would have been that Carly would grow up to be a nurse…then a doctor, maybe a lawyer. She did wind up as a medical professional, working in clinical labs, and in a busy bone marrow transplant unit at a Denver hospital, and she has lived in Denver ever since. She married and had a daugther, now a law student at Harvard and an editor of the Law Review, and Cheryl still regards mothering her daughter is her finest achievement. When her daugther was a little girl, she happened upon an article about a local romance writer, Maggie Osborne, who wrote for Harlequin under the pseudonym of Margaret St. George, and caught the bug herself. She wrote for four years, learning the craft, reading romances by the dozens, and then began the story that would become her first published romance. She called it Tangled Woods and Brambles — a reference to the obstacles the Prince had to cut through to save Sleeping Beauty. The hero was stuck in a coma, but the heroine, his doctor, could hear his thoughts. Mercifully, another friend and Harlequin author, Jasmine Cresswell, suggested the title Prince of Dreams , and the book became a sort of cult favorite, a launch title for Harlequin's Dreamscape imprint for paranormal romances. Within a month, Carly sold her second book to Harlequin Intrigue, and she's been writing romantic suspense ever since.