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Spotlight on The Golden Redepennings: Books 1 to 4

Published on 24 March: The box set of the first four Golden Redepenning novels. It’s only $4.99 until the end of the month. In February, it will revert to $9.99, which is still a great price for four long novels.

Order your copy today: https://books2read.com/GRbox-set

Here’s more about the series: The Golden Redepennings

And here are the covers of the four books included in the set:

And, finally, one of the early reviews.

I had read books 1 and 2 several years ago. It’s especially good to binge read such a series. I had forgotten how obnoxious and cynical Alex was at times in book 1 – Farewell to Kindness. In book 2 – A Raging Madness – he takes on the role of knight errant and is less bitter than in book 1. (Well, of course. He has admired Ella for years.)

In all 4 stories there are secrets to be revealed (including surprises for the reader) and many obstacles to overcome, including the reluctance of the main characters to voice their feelings for the other. I felt transported in time and place by these well-paced and carefully crafted stories.

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Tea with Miranda

Miranda de Courtenay stepped over the threshold into the tea room that was one of the great attractions of her favourite London Bookshop.Her sister Grace was browsing for something to take to read at the beach, and when Grace was choosing books, she could not be hurried. Miranda had fidgeted until Grace’s need for peace overwhelmed her wish to keep Miranda firmly under her eye.

As if Miranda was going to cause a scandal in a bookshop! Or anywhere else, to be sure. She had only provisionally been forgiven for the last one. Which was most unfair, because it had all turned out very well.

She scanned the rather full tearoom, looking for acquaintances or at least an empty chair.

“Miss de Courtenay?” The voice came from the left, and when she turned, she saw the Duchess of Haverford. Miranda curtseyed, blushing. She had coloured every time she saw Her Grace ever since the outrageous way the duchess’s sons had behaved at the house party two years ago. Which Miranda had been blamed for, of course, though she had only been flirting. Everyone flirted. It did not excuse what they suggested!

So embarrassing!

“It is rather crowded today, my dear. Come and sit with me. I have been wishing to speak with you.”

One did not refuse a duchess. Miranda pasted on a smile and took the chair to which she had been bidden.

For a few minutes, the duchess was busy ordering more tea and cakes, but far too quickly, the servant brought the order, and they were alone.

Her Grace spoke of trivialities until Miranda had her cup and had raised it to her lips. “How goes your search for a suitable lord, Miss de Courtenay?”

Miranda fought not to spray the tea everywhere, and choked on it instead. By the time she had stopped coughing, she at least had an excuse for her bright red face.

Yes, she wanted a husband who would bring her the title ‘lady’. It was so unfair that the rest of her family had titles and she didn’t. Adrian had unexpectedly inherited an earldom, and Grace was a countess by her first marriage and the wife of a duke’s son in her second, a lady twice over.

But how did Her Grace know that was what Miranda wanted?

“If I may exercise an old lady’s privilege, my dear, I would like to give you a thought to consider.”

Miranda nodded, of course, though she was sure she did not wish to hear what the duchess had to say.

“A title is for public places, Miss de Courtenay. A husband, on the other hand, has a right to be with you day and night, in public and in private. Be very sure that the person you choose is one you wish to spend the rest of your life with. Character is more important than social status or  surface attraction. Your brother and your sister both married for love, and that choice has much to recommend it.”

Miranda could not resist an answer. “Surely one can fall in love with a titled man as easily as with a commoner?” she asked.

The duchess smiled as she sipped her tea. “Love is not easy to command, my dear,” she replied, “but you shall see.”

Miranda will find out the truth of the duchess’s observation, when she meets a man who cannot give her what she thinks she wants, but whom she cannot forget.

Before I Found You: A de Courtenay Novella By Sherry Ewing

A quest for a title. An encounter with a stranger. Will she choose love?

Miss Miranda de Courtenay has only one goal in life: to find a rich husband who can change her status from Miss to My Lady.

Captain Jasper Rousseau has no plans to become infatuated during a chance encounter at a ball.

Their connection is hard to dismiss, despite Miranda’s quest for a title at all cost. What if the cost includes love?

Storm & Shelter: A Bluestocking Belles Collection With Friends

When a storm blows off the North Sea and slams into the village of Fenwick on Sea, the villagers prepare for the inevitable: shipwreck, flood, land slips, and stranded travelers. The Queen’s Barque Inn quickly fills with the injured, the devious, and the lonely—lords, ladies, and simple folk; spies, pirates, and smugglers all trapped together. Intrigue crackles through the village, and passion lights up the hotel.

One storm, eight authors, eight heartwarming novellas.

Find out more on the Bluestocking Belles’ project page. 

Only 99c while on preorder. Published April 13th.

 

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Tea with fears for Letty

“But you will let us know if my niece contacts you, Your Grace.” The impertinent man was not asking, but demanding.

Eleanor allowed a haughty eyebrow to express her opinion of his attempt at command, but did not flatter him with a response. “My butler shall show you and your son out, Kent.”

“I am her betrothed,” the younger fool insisted. “I have a right to know where she is.”

Eleanor ignored him, exchanging a glance with her butler that had him summoning the footman from the hall to insist that the two men leave.

“I doubt it,” her friend Grace observed, as the door closed behind them. “I have seen Miss Lovell in the company of the younger Mr Kent, and I very much doubt she is amenable to his suit.”

“I would hope not,” Eleanor said. “I do not know Miss Lovell well, but I have formed a good opinion of her sense, and no woman of sense would take on an overgrown schoolboy like that one. He and that father of his would strip her fortune in no time.”

Grace frowned as her friend poured tea. They had been about to partake when the Kents had been announced, their message begging help to find a missing niece and ward guaranteeing them a few minutes of the duchess’s time. Their unpleasant personalities and the holes in the story they told meant she ignored the waiting refreshments and had them removed as quickly as possible, though not before she had told them, truthfully, that she had not heard from the missing heiress, and had no idea where she was.

“Did she come to you, Grace, or to Georgie or Sophia?” The Winshire women ran a village refuge for women who needed to escape intolerable situations, but Grace was shaking her head. “Not that I have heard. I imagine she is trying to reach her uncle Robert Lovell, who is in Brussels, I believe.”

“I hope she has reached him, or found refuge elsewhere,” Eleanor told her. “The storm in the North Sea is terrible, or so my son says.”

Letty Lovell is caught up in the storm, and her ship goes down in the sea near the village of Fenwick on Sea. She is rescued by an improbable hero in the first story of the new collection, Storm & Shelter, on preorder now.

An Improbable Hero

By Mary Lancaster

A runaway heiress, a mysterious stranger.

When Letty’s ship founders in a violent storm, she forges a rare bond with her rescuer.

Simon is a troubled man on a final, deadly mission—until the spirited yet soothing Letty makes him question everything. Hiding in plain sight among the refugees at The Queen’s Barque, Simon is more than capable of protecting them both. But when the floods recede, can either of them say goodbye?

Storm & Shelter: A Bluestocking Belles Collection With Friends

When a storm blows off the North Sea and slams into the village of Fenwick on Sea, the villagers prepare for the inevitable: shipwreck, flood, land slips, and stranded travelers. The Queen’s Barque Inn quickly fills with the injured, the devious, and the lonely—lords, ladies, and simple folk; spies, pirates, and smugglers all trapped together. Intrigue crackles through the village, and passion lights up the hotel.

One storm, eight authors, eight heartwarming novellas.

Find out more on the Bluestocking Belles’ project page. 

Only 99c while on preorder. Published April 13th.

 

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Scandal on WIP Wednesday

Horse and riderBy 1 May, I need to have finished the first draft of my novella for the Bluestocking Belles’ next holiday box set. I’ve made a start, posted below. The story (The Bluestocking and the Barbarian) features a hero whose very existence, let alone his courtship, is a scandal to the English ton.

So post me an excerpt about scandal, and share with us all.

“Limp,” James Winderfield said to his horse. “Limp, my lovely, my treasure, my Jewel of the Mountains.”

Seistan obeyed his master’s hand signals, and limped heavily as they turned through the gates of the manor, and began the long trek along the dyke that led between extensive water gardens to where Lady Sophia Belvoir was attending a house party.

In his mind, James was measuring his reasons for being here against his reasons for staying away.

His father had commanded him to marry before his grandfather the duke died of the disease that consumed him, and Lady Sophia was the other half of his soul. He had felt the connection on his third day in England, when they first met, and nothing since had changed his mind. Surely he was not imagining that she felt it too?

On the other hand, Lady Sophia’s brother had threatened to beat him like a dog if he approached either of the Belvoir ladies. The house was owned by his father’s greatest enemy: the man who was challenging James’ legitimacy in the House of Lords. The party would be full of aristocrats and their hangers on, ignoring him until they found out whether he was a future duke or merely the half-breed bastard of one. And Lady Sophia had told him that neither she nor her sister Felicity wished to speak to him.

Her eyes spoke for her, though, finding him as soon as he entered a room, and following him until he left. Blue-grey eyes that veiled themselves when he caught them watching, in the longest soft brown lashes he had ever seen. She was not, as these English measured things, a beauty: her arched nose and firm chin too definite for their pale standards, her frame too long and too slender. They preferred dolls, like her sister, and Sophia was no doll.

The family needed him to marry a strong woman, one with family ties to half the peerage of this land they somehow belonged to, though he had first seen it four months ago; one who was English beyond question and English nobility to her fingertips.

James needed to marry Sophia. When their eyes first met, as he handed her the child he’d rescued from the path of a racing curricle, the shock of their connection had nearly knocked him from his horse. Him. Who had been riding before he was weaned! And then to find she had all the connections his family could desire! Surely their love was fated?

The house came into view—a great brick edifice rising four stories above the gardens, and glittering with windows. Nothing could be less like the mountain eerie in which he had been raised, but he squared his shoulders and kept walking, soothing Seisten who reacted to his master’s hesitation with a nervous sideways shuffle.

“Hush, my Wind of the North. We belong here, now. What can they do, after all?”

Beat him and cast him out, but from what he’d heard of the Duchess of Haverford, that was unlikely to happen.

“It is, after all,” he reminded his horse with a brief laugh, “the season of goodwill.”

The stables were off to one side, on a separate island to the main house. At the fork in the carriage way, James hesitated, tempted to take Seistan and see him cared for before chancing his luck at the house. If they invited him in, he would need to leave his horse to the servants while he consolidated his position.

But if they turned him away, he might need to remove himself at speed, Seistan’s limp disappearing as fast as it appeared. Besides, in the Turkenstan mountains as in England, one did not treat a private home as a caravanserai. He must be sure of his welcome before he took advantage of their stables.