I’m excited to introduce you to a new book, The Reluctant Bride by Beverley Eikli.
Beverley
has also brought along a prize that will be awarded to a randomly drawn commenter during the tour.
Leave a comment for a chance to win a $20
Amazon/BN GC. And follow the tour to increase your chances of winning. You’ll
find the tour dates HERE.
I love the book cover.
BOOK BLURB:
Winner of the Choc-Lit Australian Star
competition!Emily Micklen is proud, passionate – and left with no option after the death of her loving fiancé, Jack, but to marry the scarred, taciturn, soldier who needs to secure a well-connected wife.
Major Angus McCartney hopes that marriage to the unobtainable beauty whose confident gaze about the ballroom once failed to register his presence will offer both of them a chance to put the past to rest.
Emily’s determination to be faithful to Jack’s memory is matched only by Angus’s desire to win her with honour and action. Sent to France on a mission of national security, Angus discovers how deeply Emily has been duped, but the secrets he uncovers lead them both into danger. Can Angus and Emily unmask the real conspirators before they lose everything?
EXCERPT
‘It’s
not a sin, unless you get caught.’
The
gentle breeze seemed to whisper Jack’s teasing challenge, its soft, silken
fingers tugging at Emily’s ingrained obedience. She put down her basket and
stared with longing at the waters below, sweat prickling her scalp beneath her
poke bonnet as desire warred with fear of the consequences.
‘Where’s
your sense of adventure, Em?’
Still
resisting, Emily closed her eyes, but the wind’s wicked suggestiveness was like
the caress of Jack’s breath against her heated cheek; daring Emily to shrug
aside a lifetime of dutiful subservience – again – and peel off her clothes,
this time to plunge into the inviting stream beneath the willows.
She
imagined Jack’s warm brown eyes glinting with wickedness. Taunting her like the
burr that had worked its way into the heel of her woollen stockings during her
walk.
Exhaling
on a sigh, Emily opened her eyes and admitted defeat as she succumbed to the
pull of the reed-fringed
waters.
Desire
had won, justified by practicality. If she had to remove one stocking to
dislodge the burr she might as well remove both.
Scrambling
down the embankment, she lowered herself onto a rock by the water’s edge. Her
father would never know. If he glanced from his study in the tower room, where
he was doubtless gloating over his balance sheet, he’d assume she was a village
lass making her way along the track. Emily had never seen him interest himself
in the poor except …
Like
most unpleasant memories, she tried to cast this one out with a toss of her
head, still glad her father had never
discovered
what she’d witnessed from her bedroom window one evening five years ago: the
curious sight of Bartholomew
Micklen
ushering the beggar girl who’d arrived on his doorstep into his carriage.
Then
climbing in after her before it rumbled down the driveway and out of sight.
Now
was just another of those moments when Emily was glad her father remained in
ignorance. Her insurance, should she need it, was that she knew a few of her
father’s secrets the excise men might just want to know.
By
the time the first stocking had followed Emily’s boots onto the grassy bank she
was bursting with anticipation for her swim.
What
did one more sin matter when she’d be Mrs Jack Noble in less than a week?
AUTHOR Bio:
Beverley Eikli is the author of eight historical romances
published by Pan Macmillan Momentum, Robert Hale, Ellora's Cave and
Total-e-Bound. Recently she won UK Women's Fiction publisher Choc-Lit's Search
for an Australian Star competition with her suspenseful, spy-based Regency
Romance The Reluctant Bride.
She's been shortlisted twice for a Romance Readers of Australia
Award in the Favourite Historical category — in 2011 for A Little
Deception, and in 2012 for her racy Regency Romp, Rake's Honour,
written under her Beverley Oakley pseudonym.
Beverley wrote her first romance when she was seventeen.
However, drowning the heroine on the last page was, she discovered, not in the
spirit of the genre so her romance-writing career ground to a halt and she
became a journalist.
After throwing in her job on South Australia's metropolitan
daily The Advertiser to manage a luxury safari lodge in the Okavango
Delta, in Botswana, Beverley discovered a new world of romance and adventure in
a thatched cottage in the middle of a mopane forest with the handsome Norwegian
bush pilot she met around a camp fire.
Eighteen years later, after exploring the world in the back of
Cessna 404s and CASA 212s as an airborne geophysical survey operator during
low-level sorties over the French Guyanese jungle and Greenland's ice cap,
Beverley is back in Australia teaching in the Department of Professional
Writing & Editing at Victoria University, as well as teaching Short
Courses for the Centre of Adult Education and Macedon Ranges Further
Education.
She writes Regency Historical Intrigue as Beverley Eikli and
erotic historicals as Beverley Oakley.
Beverley won
the Choc Lit Search for an Australian Star competition with The Reluctant
Bride.
Shortlisted
for the 2012 Australian Romance Readers Award for her novel Rake's Honour
Finalist in
the 2011 Australian Romance Readers Awards for her novel A Little Deception.
Important
Links:
Barnes & Noble - http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-reluctant-bride-beverley-eikli/1114869375?ean=9781781890868
Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/Beverley-Eikli/e/B0034Q44E0
Thanks, Liz, for having me here today. I love the Napoleonic / Regency period so if anyone has any questions, just ask:)
ReplyDeleteLove the premise of the story.
ReplyDeleteKit3247(at)aol(dot)com
Thanks for sharing the excerpt and the giveaway. Sounds like a great book. evamillien at gmail dot com
ReplyDeleteInteresting story
ReplyDeletebn100candg at hotmail dot com