To Tame the Wild Rake

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First Meetings on WIP Wednesday

In fact, in my next two Works In Progress (To Reclaim the Long-Lost Lover and To Tame the Wild Rake), the first meeting in the book is not the first meeting of my couple. But that’s the one I’m sharing, since that’s the one on the page. Can you share one of yours in the comments?

First, To Reclaim the Long Lost Lover. Nate has come to London to find Sarah. Sarah has decided to marry at long last, eight years after she lost Nate.

Nate smiled and nodded, keeping his reservations to himself. Not unless my Sarah is present. But she is not yet in town, so it won’t be tonight. And even if she was in town, she would surely not be visiting the Hamners. Lady Hamner had been a ward of the Duchess of Haverford, and the Dukes of Haverford and Winshire had been feuding since Winshire arrived back in the country with a whole quiverful of foreign-born children.

He allowed day dreams about their next meeting to while away the carriage ride and the wait in the street for other carriages to move out of the way. Libby continued to chatter, but she seldom required a response beyond ‘Is that right’ and ‘If you say so’.

It must have been a good thirty minutes before they were being announced by Lord and Lady Hamner’s butler. Libby led him over to the Hamners to be introduced, and Nate looked around as he crossed the room.

A profile caught his eye. He shrugged it off. He had been Sarah wherever he went for the past eight years, and a closer look always disclosed a stranger. This stranger turned towards him, and he stopped in his tracks, cataloguing changes. The hair was slightly darker. The heart-shaped face he remembered had matured into a perfect oval. The slender body of the long-remembered girl had ripened to fulfill its promise. But, beyond any doubt, Lady Sarah Winderfield stood on the other side of the drawing room, a smile on her lips as she talked with her friends.

Her gaze turned toward him just as Libby tugged on his arm. “Bencham! Are you well?” He let her pull him along, and Sarah’s gaze drifted away. He wanted to cross the room to her; accost her; demand that she recognise him and all they’d once meant to one another.

Some modicum of sense kept him stumbling after his step-mother. Men change between seventeen and twenty-five, he reminded himself. And people who have been through experiences like mine more than most.

Still, of all the meetings he’d imagined, he’d never thought of one in which she didn’t know him.

And then To Tame the Wild Rake.

Aldridge stood as she entered the parlour. He’d chosen a seat on the far side of the room for the door, and he now ordered the footmen to wait outside. “I require a few moments of privacy with my betrothed.” After a moment’s hesitation, they obeyed, leaving the door wide open.

As she took a chair, he murmured, “Are there servant passages near us? Can we be heard if we keep our voices low?”

So that is why he’d chosen a seating group by the outside wall. “Not if we are quiet,” she confirmed.

He was examining her in the way that always made her restless — a steady look from intent hazel eyes, as if he could see her innermost thoughts. “You asked to see me,” she reminded him, to put an end it.

That broke his gaze. His lids dropped and he laughed, a short unamused bark. “And you would like to see me in Jericho. Straight to the point, then, Lady Charlotte. Your mother told my mother that you are being threatened with dire consequences if you do not marry me.”

He leaned forward, meeting her eyes again, his voice vibrating with sincerity. “I have never forced a woman, and I don’t plan to do so. I will not take an unwilling wife.”

Lola tried to hide the upwelling relief, but some of it must have shown, for he sighed as he sat back, his shoulders shifting in what would have been a slump in a less elegant man. “It is true, then. Given a choice, you will not have me.”

Lola had not expected his disappointment, the swiftly masked sadness. Before she could measure her words, she leapt to reassure him. “It is not you. I do not plan ever to marry.”

He grimaced. “So my mother tells me. Is there nothing I can say that would change your mind? You would be an outstanding duchess.”

No. She really wouldn’t. Like everyone else, he only saw the duke’s granddaughter, not the woman within. Perhaps, if he had been a man of lesser estate, if he had spoken about affection and companionship, she might have risked it. Not love. Lola didn’t trust love.

Again, he read something of her mind, for he sighed again, and gave her a wry smile and the very words she wanted. “We were friends once, my Cherry, were we not? Long ago?”

Her resolve softened at the nickname he had given her that golden summer, before it all went wrong.  “I was very young and you were very drunk,” she retorted.

He huffed a brief laugh. “Both true. Still, we could be friends again, I think. I have always hoped for a wife who could also be my friend. Is it my damnable reputation? I am not quite the reprobate they paint me, you know.”

Lola shook her head, then rethought her response. His reputation might outrun his actions, but he was reprobate enough, and the lifestyle he brushed off so casually had destroyed her brother. “Not that, though if I were disposed to marry, I would not choose a rake. Marriage is not for me, however.” Should she tell him? “I cannot be your duchess, Aldridge.”

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Fish out of water on WIP Wednesday

Part of the fun of writing is to put your characters into situations they don’t much like, and no one is more fun to torture than a hero who is usually in charge. Do you have an excerpt where your character feels like a fish out of water or the fox in a hunt? Please share in the comments. Here’s mine, from the beginning of To Tame a Wild Rake. It follows on from the piece I used a couple of weeks ago.

“Do not leave my side,” he whispered to Jessica, sternly.

She grinned up at him. “You already threatened the loss of half my dress allowance if I do.”

“Make it the whole dress allowance,” he growled, but she treated the threat with the contempt it deserved, and giggled. He’d never been able to resist any of his half-sisters, and had been putty in Jessica’s hands since she arrived in the nursery, a little infant, too thin for her age and too weak to do more than grizzle. He had put his finger into her little fist, and she had gripped it firmly, smiled at him, and made him her besotted slave from that moment.

“I mean it, Jessie. For your own reputation, even if you don’t care about feeding me to the harpies.”

Her smile slipped and became brittle. “My reputation was ruined before I was born. We cannot all be as fortunate as Matilda, Aldridge.”

He couldn’t help his wince, though the guilt was not his. Though no one risked the wrath of the Duchess of Haverford by shunning the sisters or gossiping in public, everyone knew her three wards were the base-born and unacknowledged daughters of the Duke of Haverford. As soon as Aldridge was duke, he intended to repair what he could, and acknowledge them. It wouldn’t satisfy the high sticklers, but it should help Jessica, and later Frances, to find a match.

At least his eldest sister, Matilda, was now happily married, her husband willing to ignore the scandal for love’s sake.

Jessica ignored his reaction, her mind on her own thoughts. “I will protect you, though, if only because I don’t want to live with a harpy.”

I should choose a wife and be done with it. Without his volition, his eyes scanned the room until he saw her. He had known she must be here; the hostess was, after all, her cousin. The musicale was a benefit to provide medical services in one of the poorest parts of London, or at least to provide the rental for rooms and a salary for a doctor. Lady Ashbury was rumoured to be a healer, and was certainly patroness of the proposed doctor’s clinic.

Lady Charlotte Winderfield sat with her sister, the pair of them somehow an island of serenity in the sea of ferment that was Society at its endless posturing.

“Lady Charlotte won’t have you,” Jessica observed. He glanced down into hazel eyes very similar to his own. She touched his hand. “She swears she will never marry, Aldridge. She has refused every offer, and resisted even when her father and grandfather tried to bully her.” A fact Aldridge well knew, since he had made one of the earliest of those offers, and reluctantly withdrawn it when he discovered the pressure she was under to accept.

He pulled back over himself the cover of the insouciant ducal heir. “There are others who may suit. But I am in no rush to put on shackles, Jessie. “ Not that he could fool Jessica with the part any more than he had deceived Lady Charlotte. She had been able to see through his mask since they first met. She had still been a child in the schoolroom, only fifteen. He had been twenty-seven and sozzled to the gills, nearing the end of three months of drinking and wenching that had failed to dull the edges of a loss he still shied away from considering.

He had known from the first time she scolded him for allowing his pain to make him stupid that he wanted her for his duchess. But by the time she was old enough to court, she’d grown past the friendship they’d forged that long-ago summer, and learned enough about him to reject him out of hand.

He needed to accept his dismissal like a gentleman. But that didn’t stop his yearning.

“They are about to start,” he pointed out to his sister. “Shall we find a seat?”

Lady Ashbury had hired professional musicians to entertain her guests, which was both good and bad. Good, because he didn’t have to suffer through the mediocre performances of debutantes hawking their accomplishments. Their proud mothers must all have cloth ears, or perhaps they hoped that some patron of the musical arts might marry one of them just for the right to forbid them from every playing or singing in public again.

Bad, because the dullards in the audience saw no need to pay the performers the courtesy of their attention, and insisted on chattering the whole way through.

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Tea with the dowager Lady Hamner

“And just like that,” the Countess of Hamner said, with a contented sigh, “I am now a dowager.”

The wedding was over, the wedding meal eaten, the wedding guests gone home, and the wedded couple on their way to one of Aldridge’s smaller estates, which he had placed at their disposal for the next month. The Duchess of Haverford echoed her friend’s sigh. “I thought it went off very well, Clara, do you not agree?”

“Very well, Eleanor. They will be happy, I think.”

They shared a smile. Clara’s son and Eleanor’s ward had exchanged their vows at Haverford House, before the Haverford chaplain and a small congregation of close friends and family. The bride had been even more beautiful than usual, her joy as her half brother escorted her to her groom illuminating the old chapel for more effectively than the hundreds of candles deployed for the occasion. As for Hamner, his love for his new bride was in every movement, as he took the hand she offered him with gentle reverence, and angled his body towards her, offering himself without words as her shelter and support for the rest of their lives.

Eleanor poured her friend a cup of tea. After the last few weeks of working together to organise the wedding, each knew the other’s preferences without asking. “If I can just get Jessica settled,” Eleanor said, “I can relax for a while. It is another five years before I need to consider launching Frances.”

“What of Aldridge?” Clara asked. “He will need a bride.” Since news leaked about Haverford’s impending demise, the poor Marquis had been looking ever more and more hunted.

Eleanor shook her head. “I have been told, in no uncertain terms, that I am to offer no help unless it is asked for.” She looked down at her hands, her hesitation so obvious and so out of character that Clara raised her eyebrows.

“I am a safe listener, if you would like one. Or we can speak of something else, if you prefer.”

Eleanor clasped the hand Clara offered. “It is just that I have interfered before, my dear, and Aldridge feels that I put the duchy and its welfare ahead of his happiness. I cannot say he is wrong. I fear that I have hurt him, though all I intended was to protect him. You do believe that, do you not?”

“No one can doubt that you love your son, Eleanor,” Clara insisted.

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The wedding follows (by a matter of six weeks) the end of Melting Matilda, a novella in the newest Bluestocking Belles collection,  Fire & Frost. Aldridge’s love story is slowly coming together inside my computer as we speak.

 

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Thinking series on WIP Wednesday

I’ve done very little writing over the last two months. I’m not entirely sure why. Christmas. Stuff going on with the family. Heavy lifting on a couple of projects at work. But I’m determined to get To Wed a Proper Lady out to beta readers and up for preorder in the next week, and to finish writing the first draft of To Mend the Broken Hearted before the end of February.

I’m also starting the next two, which need to be written at the same time since the heroines are sisters and the stories are concurrent. This week, I’m posting what might be the start of To Tame the Wild Rake, and I invite you to post anything you wish from a series work in progress.

He could not sense the presence of Lady Charlotte Winderfield in his room. The idea was ridiculous.

For a start, the bluestocking social reformer they called the West Wind would rather die than enter the bed chamber of any man, let alone the notorious Marquess of Aldridge.

For another, he was not in a position to sense anything outside of the plump white thighs of Baroness Thirby, unless it was the expert ministrations of her close friend, Mrs Meesham. Lady Thirby’s thighs blocked both his ears and his line of sight, and — in any case — no-one in the room could hear a thing over the yapping sounds she made as he drove her closer to her release. And he could not possibly smell the delicate mix of herbs and flowers that drove him crazy every time he was in Lady Charlotte’s vicinity; not over the musk of Lady Thirby’s arousal.

Damn it. The thought of the chit was putting Aldridge off his own release, despite Mrs Meesham’s best efforts. It was no use pining after her. With his reputation, her family would not even consider him. And if they could be persuaded, she couldn’t. She had made her opinion perfectly clear.

Above him, Lady Thirby stiffened and let out the keening wail with which she celebrated her arrival at that most delicious of destinations. At any moment, she would collapse bonelessly beside him, and he could maybe bury himself in her or her friend and forget all about the unattainable Saint Charlotte.

Instead, Lady Thirby stiffened still further. “What is she doing here?” She scooted backwards so that she could look him in the eye, still crouched, thank the stars. He didn’t fancy the weight of her sitting on his chest. “It’s one thing to do this with Milly. But you didn’t say you were inviting someone else.”

Standing in his doorway, her lips pressed into a tight line and her face white except for two spots of high colour on her cheekbones, was the woman of his fondest dreams. And she didn’t look happy to be there.

The cold air on his damp member told him that Mrs Meesham had likewise abandoned what she’d been doing to stare at the doorway. “She’s never here for a romp, Margaret. She’s one of the Winderfield twins.”

Aldridge sighed. He couldn’t imagine what sort of a crisis had brought Saint Charlotte here, but clearly he was going to have to deal with it.

“My lady,” he said, “if you would be kind enough to wait in the next room, I’ll find a robe and join you.”

She pulled her fascinated gaze from what had been revealed by Mrs Meecham’s movement, and glared at him. “More than a robe. You have to come with me and we have no time to waste.”

“He can’t go out,” Mrs Meecham objected. “Aldridge,” (when Lady Charlotte said nothing but just retreated into the next room), “you can’t go. You haven’t done me, yet.”

Aldridge had already left the bed, and was pulling on his pantaloons. “I am sorry to cut our entertainments short. Sadly, the messenger — who, by the way, neither of you saw,” (he gave them the ducal look learned from his father), “brings me word of an appointment I cannot miss. My heartiest regrets. Please, feel free to carry on without me.” He bowed with all the elegance at his command. He could shrug into his waistcoat and coat and pull on his boots while she told him what the problem was. It was a little late to worry about appearing in front of her improperly dressed.

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Tea with a concerned mother

Eleanor, Duchess of Winshire had known Mia Redepenning since she was a child — a small girl with big eyes much overlooked by her only relative, her absent-minded father. Back when Eleanor was Duchess of Haverford, the man spent six months at Haverford Castle cataloguing the library while his little daughter did her lessons at a library table or crept mouse-like around the castle or its grounds.

Who would have thought, back in the days that Mia first became acquainted with the duchess’s goddaughter during a visit, that she would one day be a connection of Kitty’s and of Eleanor herself, by marriage? Or that, more than twenty years after the first time Mia and Kitty had joined Eleanor for tea in the garden, they met for tea whenever they were both in London?

Not that Mia and her husband Jules spent much time in London. He owned a coastal shipping business in Devon, and they lived not far from Plymouth, but Eleanor suspected that the main reason for their dislike of London Society lay in their three oldest children. And those children, if Eleanor was not mistaken, were the reason for Mia’s call today, and her distraction.

“Yes, I will help,” she said.

Mia, startled, opened her eyes wide.

“You want a powerful sponsor to introduce your Marsha to Society, and I am more than happy to bring her and Frances out together, my dear. Marsha is a very prettily behaved girl, and will be a credit to you and to me.”

Mia laughed. “I was wondering how to work around to the subject, Aunt Eleanor. I should have known you would see right through me.”

“It won’t be entirely straightforward, my dear,” Eleanor warned. “Thanks to that horrid man that kidnapped Dan all those years ago, everyone who was out in Society when you brought the children back from South Africa know what their mother was to your husband. Most people won’t be rude to Marsha’s face, not when she is sponsored by your family and mine. But they will talk behind our backs, I cannot deny it.”

“Talk behind our backs, I can handle,” Mia commented, “and the children all know the truth, so they cannot be hurt by having it disclosed.” She frowned. “But will they really invite her to their homes? Will she have suitors?”

“The highest sticklers will ignore her,” the duchess said. “She might not receive tickets for Almacks. But for the most part, Society will pay lip service to story you tell them, since what you tell them is supported by the Redepennings, the Winshires, the Haverfords and all our connections.” She returned Mia’s tentative smile.

“I have done this before, my dear, and am about to do it again. All the world knows my wards are more closely related to the previous duke than we admit, but as long as I insist that they are distant connections, born within wedlock to parents who died and begged me to take them in, they all pretend to believe it. As to suitors, Matilda married well, and my poor Jessica’s problems had nothing to do with her bloodlines — the match seemed a good one at the time. I expect Frances to also make an excellent marriage.”

Mia shook her head slowly. “They are wards to a duchess. Jules and I are very ordinary by comparison. We can dower our girls, though, and as long as we can protect them from direct insult, we do not wish to deny them the same debut as their cousins and their younger sisters.”

“No need to deny them. The Polite World will accept that Marsha is, as the public story has it, the daughter of a deceased couple that Jules knew while he was posted overseas with the navy. We shall watch them closely to keep the riff raff at bay, and they will have a marvelous time, as shall you and I, Mia.” She held out her hand, for all the world as if they were men sealing a business deal, and after a moment, Mia took her hand and shook it.

Mia and Jules have their story in Unkept Promises, where you can meet Marsha, Dan, and their little sister. Matilda’s love story is coming soon, in Melting Matilda, a novella in Fire & Frost. Jessica is also introduced in that story. Her tragedy will be a sub plot of her brother’s story, the third book of The Children of the Mountain King series. As to Eleanor’s story, it spans that series, and concludes in the sixth novel.