A Seduction in the Stars

by Jess Michaels

  “I will always save you,” she reassured him as she gripped his hand all the tighter, “and know that you will do the same for me.”

  “Aye, I will,” he agreed. “That is part of our future.”

  “Part? And what is the rest?” she said, smiling at his teasing.

  “Well, every day we’ll come to know each other more,” he said.

  “Trust each other more,” she added.

  “So you do know the future,” he said. “I do not need to tell you at all.”

  “Not true.” She leaned a little closer. “I want to hear my future from your lips every day for the rest of my life. I demand it.”

  “If you demand it, I must obey,” he said, his fingers brushing along her hip quite scandalously. “For as you know, I am hopelessly devoted to you.”

  And as he spun her around the floor once more, she realized that fact was the only thing she really knew for certain. And it was more than enough.

  Author’s Note

  The planet Henry is so earnestly seeking in A Lady’s Gift for Seduction is Neptune. There are some who theorize that Galileo first predicted the existence of Neptune in the 17th century. By the regency, astronomy (especially comets, like the one Henry viewed with his beloved mother) was all the rage and amateur astronomers were seeking celestial bodies all over the sky. Telescopes of the time obviously couldn’t find planets so far from our own, so mathematical equations were developed to predict orbits and provide proof of existance. At the time what we know now as Neptune wasn’t known to be a planet or a meteor or some other body, but our Henry is convinced and of course he was right.

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  But poor Henry would be skunked by a Frenchman, Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier almost thirty years after our story, who proved the existence of the planet mathematically in 1846. I would like to think in our Jess Michaels story world that he used some of Henry’s equations to do so, and that Henry would simply be over the moon pleased with the proof of what he always believed to be true.

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  I hope you enjoyed Henry and Evangeline’s love story. Happy reading!