Unbefitting a Lady

by Bronwyn Scott

  Phaedra had been unsure of their reception but Giles had welcomed her with open arms and he’d shaken Bram’s hand with sincere congratulations. Aunt Wilhelmina had met them with a noncommittal ‘humph’ and the begrudging concession that at least he was an earl’s son. But she’d seen to the decorating of the chapel with spring flowers and to the arranging of the wedding breakfast that would follow.

  They arrived at the front without mishap. Giles relinquished her to Bram and, at Reverend Seagrove’s instruction, Bram pushed back the thin veil. The ceremony was a blur of words and responses. It was neither long nor short. She lost all track of time. She would have stood there all day just to look into Bram’s eyes.

  It was her turn to slip the ring on Bram’s finger. ‘I think you’re very brave to marry into the Montagues,’ she whispered, acutely aware that Bram stood before her today alone. His family had not come. But in a few minutes he’d have a new family.

  Bram smiled. ‘No braver than you are to marry me.’

  It was time to kiss the bride. Bram swept her into his arms and kissed her hard on the mouth, hard enough to make Aunt Wilhelmina gasp disapprovingly in the front row and her father to be heard to remark, ‘By Jove, that’s the way to kiss a woman.’ Phaedra blushed. What possessed him to say such a thing? Had he lost his mind? Oh, right, he had.

  * * *

  ‘We’re married. For the rest of our lives.’ Bram chuckled as they lay in the dark of their marriage suite.

  ‘For better or for worse,’ Phaedra teased, shifting in the crook of his arm. The ‘breakfast’ had finally broken up by late afternoon and the family had politely left them to themselves in the newly prepared wing she and Bram would call home.

  ‘I have a gift for you, Phaedra.’ Bram stretched for something on the side table. ‘I wanted to give it to you this morning but Aunt Willy...’

  ‘Say no more.’ Phaedra sat up, shaking her hair over her shoulders. Aunt Willy had been a termagant about the groom not seeing the bride before the wedding.

  ‘Actually, I have two things. Open this first. It’s a letter from my father. He sends his regrets.’

  Phaedra opened the letter, written on heavy white paper. ‘I thought you were supposed to send felicitations.’

  ‘No, regrets about not being able to attend, not the marriage,’ Bram corrected. ‘Apparently marriage has made me respectable.’

  A bank draft fluttered out between the folds. Phaedra read the amount with wide eyes. ‘Apparently so.’ She passed the bank draft to Bram but he turned it away. ‘It’s yours. For the stud.’

  Phaedra smiled. ‘Then it’s ours. The stud is ours. We’re married now, there is no more yours and mine. You didn’t listen to Reverend Seagrove very well.’

  ‘I was a little distracted.’ He handed her a long slim box. ‘This is what I really wanted to give you.’

  Phaedra protested. She didn’t need anything more than him. She had all she needed to make her happy, but when she opened the box, her eyes misted. Inside the box lay her mother’s pearls, the ones she’d sold for Warbourne.

  ‘How?’ was the only word she could articulate.

  Bram leaned over and kissed her tears. ‘Love always finds a way, my dear.’ He kissed the column of her throat as he fastened the strand around her neck. ‘You were wearing them the first day I saw you. I thought you were magnificent, and I was right.’

  * * * * *

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  Read on to find out more about Bronwyn Scott and the series…

  Bronwyn Scott is a communications instructor at Pierce College in the United States, and is the proud mother of three wonderful children (one boy and two girls). When she’s not teaching or writing she enjoys playing the piano, travelling—especially to Florence, Italy—and studying history and foreign languages.

  Readers can stay in touch on Bronwyn’s website, www.bronwynnscott.com, or at her blog, www.bronwynswriting.blogspot.com—she loves to hear from readers.

  Previous novels from Bronwyn Scott:

  PICKPOCKET COUNTESS

  NOTORIOUS RAKE, INNOCENT LADY

  THE VISCOUNT CLAIMS HIS BRIDE

  THE EARL’S FORBIDDEN WARD

  UNTAMED ROGUE, SCANDALOUS MISTRESS

  A THOROUGHLY COMPROMISED LADY

  SECRET LIFE OF A SCANDALOUS DEBUTANTE

  UNBEFITTING A LADY†

  HOW TO DISGRACE A LADY*

  *Rakes Beyond Redemption trilogy

  †Castonbury Park Regency mini-series

  And in Harlequin® Historical Undone! eBooks:

  LIBERTINE LORD, PICKPOCKET MISS

  ICKED EARL, WANTON WIDOW

  ARABIAN NIGHTS WITH A RAKE

  AN ILLICIT INDISCRETION

  And in Harlequin® Historical eBooks:

  PRINCE CHARMING IN DISGUISE (part of Royal Weddings Through the Ages)

  Author Q&A

  Apart from your own, which other heroine did you empathise with the most? And which hero did you find the most intriguing?

  I really liked Claire in Ann Lethbridge’s story, because it’s so hard for her to ‘go home again’ and she knows she made a terrible mistake. Now all she can do is try to pick up the pieces and put her life back together.

  As for heroes—all the Rothermere boys are pretty hot guys. It’s hard to decide, but I’d have to go with Giles simply because we get to spend the whole series with him, and as writers we got to know him very well. I think readers will get to know him too, and look forward to his appearances in the books. We all kept sending Carole e-mails asking if Giles could come out to play—I am sure the weirdest e-mail she got was mine. Since we were all writing our stories at the same time, I wasn’t sure how intimate Giles was going to be with Lily, since his wedding was going to have a long traditional engagement before it and was to be put off until the following year, so I wrote: Dear Carole, Is Giles having sex with Lily? How much sex? Is he going to be celibate the whole year or what? But I made it up to Giles by getting him a horse the next day. That e-mail went something like: Dear Carole, I got Giles a big black horse today. What does Giles want to name it? To which Carole replied: Name it Genghis and say he rescued it in the war.

  What is your heroine’s favourite childhood memory of Castonbury Park?

  She has two. The first is riding ponies and horses across the Castonbury lands with her brother Edward, the one who was killed at Waterloo. They were the two youngest by several years, so they hung out together. Edward was slightly older than Phaedra, and he encouraged her to do all sorts of wild things. The wildness stuck. Even after Edward is killed, Phaedra continues to pursue their mutual dream of raising race horses and winning the Derby—something they fantasised about in their childhood. Her second favourite memory is from the summers when all the Montague kids would swim or row out to the little island on the lake—this little island is also the scene of her first big intimate encounter with sexy Bram Basingstoke.

  Which Montague do you think Mrs Stratton the housekeeper let get away with the most?

  Edward. He was the youngest male and he and Phaedra looked more like their mother than the other Montague children. Edward is described at a couple of different points as having ‘an angel’s good looks but the wild waywardness of a devil’. He’d have charmed his way out of everything.

  Which stately home inspired Castonbury Park and why?

  Kedleston. It’s been featured in films like The Duchess. The house is located up in Derbyshire, as well, which helped us get a feel for what kind of natural features would be on the land—rivers, lake
s, that sort of thing—and what kind of flora and fauna and weather conditions too. I was thrilled to find really good descriptions of the Kedleston stables for Phaedra’s book, which helped immensely. We had fun posting photos of the interior and exterior on our website to help each other with set pieces for the stories.

  Where did you get the inspiration for Phaedra and Bram?

  I wanted to do a horse story, but I didn’t want to do a steeplechase for several reasons. 1) I’d done a steeplechase story in UNTAMED ROGUE, SCANDALOUS MISTRESS, and steeplechasing wasn’t officially all that popular in 1817. It didn’t gain momentum as an officially recognised format until the 1830s, so it was also too early. 2) My husband had just got back from touring the big Kentucky breeding farms and was going on about the huge stables. 3)My daughter Catie rides English hunt seat, and we’d just bought her first jumper. 4) Flat-racing was/is such a big part of English tradition.

  As for Phaedra, my Catie is a lot like her. She can talk to horses, and we haven’t met a horse yet Catie can’t ride. As for Bram, it was easy to decide on creating a groom for the continuity. We wanted to have some upstairs downstairs style storylines between the family and the servants, and I thought a groom was the perfect choice—lots of good reasons to be taking his shirt off and for being outdoors. As for how Bram looks—can I just say I find the Ralph Lauren Polo model highly inspirational?

  What are you researching for your forthcoming novel?

  I am just finishing the final handful of chapters for the last book in my autumn 2012 series Rakes Beyond Redemption, and then I will kick off a duet about ladies behaving badly—only they’re not ladies in the tonnish sense. Readers will get to meet Mercedes, daughter of a billiards champion, who is also an incredible billiards player in her own right, and the dashing half pay officer Grier Barrington in a Color of Money-style story. I’ve been spending time researching the state of billiards in 1835. Readers will also get to meet Eloise, daughter of a yacht designer, and the sexy rogue Dorian in a story based around the annual regatta—I’d like to call the story SEX WITH PIRATES, but we’ll see (smiles). Then, after that, I have a big surprise planned for MY next series. I can hardly wait. It’s already researched and sitting on my shelf, waiting to go.

  What would you most like to have been doing in Regency times?

  Dancing with handsome men! Shopping, buying horses and more dancing with handsome men!

  AUTHOR NOTE

  I hope you’re enjoying the Montagues! I was thrilled to be part of this continuity series, and even more thrilled to be working on another horse story. One element we wanted to emphasise in the series was the upstairs-downstairs-style interaction between the family and the servants. What better relationship to explore than a groom and A headstrong youngest daughter? Grooms are notoriously sexy, and they have lots of reasons to take their shirts off while they’re working the horses. What more could I ask for?

  On a more serious note, I love a heroine with a dream, and Phaedra has one: to race a colt she’s trained at the prestigious Epsom Derby. It was great fun to research Epsom and accounts of the Derby. I’ve tried to be as true to fact as possible in my fictionalised accounting of the race. The comments about the difficulty and layout of the course are accurate. The names of the horses that raced that year and their riders or owners are also accurate, as is the description of the Waterloo Inn, where Phaedra stays, although it was not clear that the Waterloo had changed its name at that point.

  Buxton is also accurately represented as a home of many popular and well-attended horse fairs during that time period.

  I want to give many thanks to the Epsom Historical Society, who helped unearth some key data.

  I hope you enjoy Phaedra’s story and the evolution of the Montague mystery as more is revealed about Jamie Montague’s demise, Alicia’s identity and Giles’s attempts to keep the Rothermere dynasty together against impossible odds.

  Keep reading and I’ll see you out there

  Drop by the blog and leave your thoughts at: www.Bronwynswriting.blogspot.com

  Don’t miss the next instalment of Castonbury Park—

  REDEMPTION OF A FALLEN WOMAN

  by Joanna Fulford

  ‘Time is running out and only you can save our family…’

  Harry Montague must discover the truth about his family’s missing heir—for better or worse. But his thoughts are sidetracked from the moment he first sees Elena Ruiz, beautiful and fierce in her bright red dress.

  She’s innocent, yet Spanish society has condemned her. Harry can help this woman in need with the security of a marriage made on paper—but nothing more. For his heart is armoured by pain and regret from the past. And yet soon he finds himself fighting an unexpected longing for his new wife that grows each day…

  REDEMPTION OF A FALLEN WOMAN

  Joanna Fulford

  ‘You’ve run away?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry to spring this on you, My Lord, but I had no choice.’

  The grey eyes were steely. ‘To spring what on me, exactly?’

  Her heart pounded. ‘Concha and I want to travel with you.’ Seeing his expression, she hurried on. ‘We are both accomplished riders, we both know how to take care of ourselves, and we’re used to rough living.’

  ‘I dare say. All the same...’

  ‘We won’t slow you down and we won’t be a nuisance.’

  ‘You cannot seriously imagine...’

  ‘All we ask is the protection of your company until we reach England.’

  ‘England! Now, look...’

  ‘I have a married sister who lives in Hertfordshire. She will help us. Only first we have to get there.’

  ‘I’m not going to England, Elena. Not for months yet.’

  ‘Of course not. First we will help you to discover the truth about your brother. Then we will go.’

  ‘Elena, you must see that it isn’t possible.’

  There it was again, the familiar use of her name, yet it didn’t seem in any way disrespectful on his lips. Rather it afforded her a glimmer of hope.

  ‘I will not go back, My Lord.’

  ‘I wasn’t suggesting that you should, but nor is it fitting that you attempt such a journey.’

  ‘If you do not help us then we shall go on alone and face what comes.’

  ‘It’s too dangerous. Quite apart from the vagaries of the weather, and the numerous natural obstacles you are likely to encounter, the mountains are full of brigands.’

  ‘It would be less dangerous with four,’ she replied. ‘Concha and I both shoot well.’

  Harry felt winded, as though he had fallen from a great height and then landed between a rock and a hard place. Desperately he tried to marshal his thoughts. Elena wouldn’t go back, and he didn’t blame her for it, but neither could he let her go on alone. Every masculine instinct forbade it.

  Yet the implications of their going on together were fraught with difficulty too. No matter what she said to the contrary, he would be responsible for the two women. It was a burden of care he could do without. Besides, his track record in that area was abysmal. Had he not already failed the woman who had trusted him most? Had he not also failed the man who had been his best friend? Their trust in him had been misplaced and both were dead. His jaw tightened. If he abandoned Elena and Concha now he would be adding two more to that score, because they would likely perish before they ever saw Seville, never mind England. Conscience dictated that he couldn’t let that happen.

  ‘All right. You travel with us, but it will be on the condition that you take orders from me.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I mean it, Elena. All our lives may depend on it.’

  She nodded. ‘Very well.’

  ISBN: 9781426876769

  © Nikki Poppen 2012

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