Terri
If you were hoping to ARC read Only a Duke Will Do, then good news! It’s available on Netgalley!
If you’re still not sure, here are some niche tropes:
Meet cute of hiding in the same servants’ corridor
He c*mes in his breeches
Distracts her panic with a kiss
He will have her even if he doesn’t deserve to
It’s coming out next Friday, which is super exciting! I am honestly SO excited to put this book in the world!
Enjoy this little exclusive snippet of one of my favourite scenes. He thinks he doesn’t care about her, but he came after her when he saw her run into a stampeding crowd, and he calms her when she has a panic attack.
And then he provides her with a distraction. As any good gentleman should.
Amelia didn’t know how to tell him that she couldn’t stop. There was nothing she could do. “I’m sorry,” she choked.
A sigh, and then he moved, shifting them both so her back pressed against the wheel of a carriage. Spokes dug into her spine and shoulder blades.
“What you need,” he murmured, releasing her so he could tip her face up to his, “is a distraction.”
She frowned, opening her mouth to question what he could possibly mean by that, when he pressed his mouth against hers.
Shock ran through her body, dispelling some of the panic. She sucked in a breath through her nose, and he broke away briefly, giving her a chance to breathe before kissing her again.
He was kissing her. Here, on the ground in the mud, people flying all around. The warm pressure of his lips against hers dominated her senses. Dismay fluttered through her, but then he tilted his head, slotting his mouth more properly against hers, and between one heartbeat and the next, something changed.
Pleasure whispered down her limbs.
The hand on the back of neck held her in place, and he opened his mouth, the tip of his tongue stroking along the seam of her lips, begging her to let him in.
Her muscles loosened, and for a moment—an elongated, honey-drenched second—she sank into the feel of his body against hers. The warmth of his mouth, the wet heat of his tongue, and her own instinctual response to it. Despite the intimacy of the moment, there was something chaste and methodical about his kisses. But then, when she inhaled and opened her mouth, a shudder ran through him.
His kiss turned hungry, pressing her against the spokes of the wheel with sudden abandon. The slide of his tongue against hers unlocked something in her, and she tugged at his coat as though she could pull him closer.
Stop, the rational part of her brain demanded.
Keep going, a place deep in her belly insisted. It would be so easy to lose herself to Lord Nicholas’s caresses, to let him keep kissing her until she forgot about the world, until she was suspended in space and time and he was the only thing that existed.
The way he had come for her showed her another side to his character, and she clung to that kindness like sugar, precious and sweet.
He had come for her. He—
Wanted her to marry his brother.
Other News
I’ve taken a break from editing The Scholar’s Secret, the next book in the Westfield Pact series, to write this newsletter. And I’ll be going back to it once I’m done. It’s been so much fun—and I’ve learnt a lot about palaeology, too! This has definitely been my most research-heavy book by a considerable margin.
But it’s so much fun! Benedict is very different from devil-may-care Nicholas, because he does care a lot. He’s dealing with grief and the knowledge he disappointed his late father, and the one person he could confide in—our heroine—doesn’t know he’s secretly pretending to be his dead cousin.
Whoops.
Once I’ve handed this round to my editor, I’ll be going back to my Victorian thief book to get a good chunk of that done, before splitting my time between that and the final book in the Westfield Pact series, To Love a Viscount.
After that, I think I’ll need a break!
But, speaking of breaks, I am going on holiday at the end of this month. And, tomorrow, it’s my wedding anniversary, which is crazy, because it turns out I’ve been married for five years. Everything sneaks up on you so fast! But it’s been a wonderful five years—the best—and I’m so painfully, disgustingly in love with my husband.
Oh, and I also updated the cover for In Search of a Hero to better match the other covers of the series. I love it! What do you think?
I haven’t been doing much reading recently—been so snowed under with writing—but I have Alice Coldbreath’s A Foolish Flirtation loaded on my Kindle ready to go. I first fell in love with An Inconvenient Vow, and I’m determined to read all of them one day!
That’s all from me for now!
I’ll be back on the 24th!
Terri x
