He thought he had buried his heart with his children. He was wrong.
Helped by the earl who hurt them, hidden from the earl who hunts them, Anne and her sisters have been accepted into the heart of a tiny rural village. Until another earl comes visiting.
Rede lives to avenge the deaths of his wife and children. After three long years of searching, he is closing in on the ruthless villains who gave the orders, and he does not hope to survive the final encounter. Until he meets Anne.
As their inconvenient attraction grows, a series of near fatal attacks draws them together and drives them apart. When their desperate enemies combine forces, Anne and Rede must trust one another to survive.
Farewell to Kindness is Book 1 in the series The Golden Redepennings.
Excerpt
That night, Anne dreamt of dancing with Lord Chirbury. In her dream, they didn’t walk decorously away after the wild excitement of the dance, to find her sisters and go tamely home. In her dream, the first vigorous dance led to another, even wilder, and part way through the second he swung her out into the shadows as she’d seen some of the village men do with their wives and sweethearts. In her dream, he’d caught her up into his arms and pressed his lips to hers.
“Call me Rede,” he insisted, his voice husky as she’d heard it once or twice, his vivid eyes burning into hers.
In her dream, she confessed that she’d been thinking of him as ‘Rede’ ever since they met in his woods and picked berries together.
“Anne,” he murmured, holding her closer.
There was something not right about the embrace, about the kisses he showered on her face. Drifting awake, she acknowledged she expected more: not a hug such as Ruth or Kitty might give; not a flurry of pecks like those she received from Daisy and Meg.
She had never been kissed by a man, but something told her that, if Rede ever did kiss her, it would be a different kind of kiss to the ones her sisters gave. It would be a kiss that spoke to the strange, unsettling physical responses that troubled her body when he was near; when his gloved hand touched her hand or the small of her back; when his hard body tensed under hers as she leaned across to untangle the brambles; when he moved smoothly through the dance, displaying his strength and fitness, the lines and angles of the muscles in his thighs and shoulders. Or now, when she thought of all those things.
She felt herself blush in the dark. Such foolish thoughts. Rede—Lord Chirbury—wasn’t for her. With her past and her need to keep Kitty hidden, she could not be wife to a peer, and she would not be anything less than a wife. Quite apart from the morals of such a choice, she wouldn’t take any risks with Kitty’s chances of being reestablished in the life to which they’d been born.
The heat in her face increased, as she acknowledged to herself that she was rushing her fences. Apart from those few heated glances, which she—in her inexperience—might have misunderstood, Rede had shown no signs of wishing to bed her, let alone wed her.
The thought should have made her feel better. Odd, then, that she felt slightly disgruntled. Did she want him to proposition her? Like his impertinent cousin? Surely not.
But a small voice deep in the back of her mind said that she would like to know he desired her as she did him, even if they never acted on that desire. Which, of course, she assured herself hastily, they never would.