No debutante was ever more desperate to escape the clutches of a detestable suitor than Fanny Brightwell but will she find the burning kisses of her secret lover worth the price?
With just weeks before the end of the Season, London's most daring debutante Miss Fanny Brightwell must contract a brilliant match or face the consequences-marriage to the pestilential Lord Slyther.
When Fanny unexpectedly participates in a night of stupendous passion with the delectable but notorious rake, Viscount Fenton, his offer of a carte blanche instead of holy matrimony ignites more than just a polite refusal. The time has come for Fanny to take the reins.
General Release Date: 9th January 2012
Vauxhall Gardens, 1818
One balmy summer evening in Vauxhall Gardens, the irresistible but impecunious Miss Fanny Brightwell made the biggest miscalculation of her life.
She realised it as she tore herself from the arms of her evening’s unsatisfactory escort, choking on a sob as she stumbled from their supper box onto the Druid Walk. She knew the repercussions would be very terrible unless the discretion of her deficient admirer could be relied upon—which was scant consolation since Lord Alverley’s notion of honour was the very reason she was in such a predicament.
Yes, there would be consequences for her surprising lapse.
She just had no idea how terrible they’d be.
“Forgive me, Fanny!”
Alverley’s voice, desperate and disembodied, competed with the distant strains of the orchestra as he hurried after her. “Lady Georgiana has been my intended bride since we were children... I thought you knew that.”
Alverley wanted her to forgive him for such a betrayal when her future lay in tatters? Her mother would never forgive her.
Clutching the spider-gauze fichu of her daring costume, Fanny turned with a glare, stepping back to avoid his open-armed approach.
He wanted her, but not as his wife. Could he really imagine she’d sacrifice her reputation, and that of her family, to be his mistress?
Fighting back tears, she delivered her parting words, more a hiss than the dignified approach her mother would have counselled. “You deceived me, Alverley.”
The thought of being in his embrace ever again made her stomach churn. He had betrayed her, wasted more than a year of her precious life. A year, when she had less than weeks...
“Fanny, wait—” His eyes were beseeching.
Cow’s eyes.
She’d thought it from the start, so why had she persisted in this futile courtship, knowing, yet refusing to acknowledge, that his outward charms were illusory, his address gauche and his intentions—she trembled at the indignity—so extremely dishonourable?
The answer taunted her before she’d even finished asking herself the question.
Because the alternative was worse than death.
She thought of fat Lord Slyther, with his moist skin and his repulsive breath, and trembled even more.
Yet it wasn’t only Alverley’s deception that had landed her in this predicament. She had to take responsibility for her own gullibility. The normally careful, calculating Miss Fanny Brightwell had miscalculated, and wouldn’t her mother remind her that Lord Slyther was both just punishment and more than a girl like her could have hoped for?
She would, and Fanny couldn’t bear it.
“Fanny, I—” He was right behind her. Quickly, she spun away, her flimsy-soled slippers skidding on the gravel, her ankle giving way beneath her. She felt the brush of leaves, the scratch of branches, and thought of the pitiful sight she would make as her mother vented her fury upon her.
Fanny was to have made the Brightwells’ fortunes. She amended this in the split second available for thought. Fanny had begged to be given this last chance before the ghastly alternative that would ensure the Brightwells’ survival...
...but Fanny had failed.
The ground rushed to meet her. So! This was to be the final indignity—to land in the dirt at his feet!
She closed her eyes, throwing out her hands and tensing as she anticipated the pain, wishing the price of her failure could be similarly condensed.
Instead, strong, unfamiliar bare arms scooped her up and an amused voice murmured in her ear, “Young lady, I think you’d be far safer tucked up in your own bed than consorting with this obviously unsatisfactory gentleman.”
She was pinioned against a hard chest clad in fine linen. When she looked up, a pair of dark eyes glinted at her through the slits of his demi-mask. Instinctively, Fanny struggled, causing her rescuer to chuckle. “It seems your companion has bitten off more than he can chew.”
His levity in the face of her humiliation, still so fresh, swept away the gratitude Fanny might otherwise have felt.
“Put me down,” she demanded, as Alverley appeared beside the hanging lantern and, with tragic, bovine eyes, regarded her clasped to the stranger’s chest.
“Your intervention, sir, is appreciated...” When the stranger made no move to set Fanny on her feet, Alverley’s voice became diffident. “However, we must rejoin our party. Please...put the lady down.”
Historical Romance Author Beverley Oakley took her passion for handsome rogues and worthy heroines to new heights when she worked in the back of low-flying survey aircraft over Greenland and French Guyana in the 1990s.
Her imaginative forays into the ballrooms of Regency high society, scribbled on paper during long and turbulent survey lines, were counterbalanced by the efforts of her mostly male fellow crewmembers to teach her an appreciation of a cold Windhoek Lager or fiery KWV Brandy; so three-month contracts away from home were borne with as much enjoyment as fortitude.
While Beverley’s broad repertoire of fictional heroes was fine-tuned through years of working in the male-dominated safari and airborne survey industries, her mostly nineteenth century heroines, by contrast, live very sheltered lives.
Beverley now lives with her family in Melbourne, Australia, twenty years after hitching her star to the Cessna Caravan (now a Boeing 777) of the handsome Norwegian bush pilot she met around a campfire in Botswana’s beautiful Okavango Delta where she ran a safari lodge at the time. She teaches creative writing, makes historical costumes and works as a Disaster Events Researcher.
Beverley’s latest project is set in Colonial Lesotho where she was born and where her father prosecuted medicine murder and illegal diamond buying cases in the African kingdom’s rugged mountains during the 1960s.
Beverley loves hearing from readers. You can contact her or find out more about her books here:
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You can also sign up for her Newsletter here: http://www.beverleyoakley.com/about
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