by Wendy Vella
“I am here, my love, safe with you as I will always be,” Sophie whispered as she moved closer to kiss his lips, a soft aching kiss that was filled with tenderness.
“Yes,” Patrick said, lifting her into his arms and sinking beneath the hot water. “Always,” he whispered.
“My mother has arrived!”
Sophie lowered the biscuit she was feeding Timmy, who was sitting on her knee, as Amelia burst into the room. Her eyes were wide and she was panting, which suggested she had run to find Sophie.
“Your mother is here at Plentiful?”
“Yes!” Amelia squealed. “And she is in your pretty blue parlor with Stephen and Letty.”
“Dear lord!” Sophie said, lifting Timmy with her good arm as she quickly gained her feet.
“That cannot be good, can it?” Amelia whispered, looking terrified.
“I … I … ah.” Sophie was unable to form a word, faced with such an unexpected turn of events.
“And what has you stuttering, my love?” Patrick said, walking into the room to take Timmy from her, then leaning down to nuzzle her neck.
“Patrick!” Sophie remonstrated, as color flooded her cheeks.
“Sophie,” Patrick mimicked, then kissed her soundly.
“Amelia has seen me do this enough times to not be offended, is that not right, Miss Pette?”
“Y-yes.”
Amelia stuttered, much to Patrick’s amazement; he had never heard Amelia stutter. He looked at both women then and noted their identical expressions. They appeared to be stunned.
“What has you two in such a flutter?” he asked, taking Sophie’s hand in his as he moved Timmy to perch against his shoulder.
“My mother has arrived, Patrick. She is in Sophie’s favorite parlor with Stephen and Letty, and the door is locked,” Amelia rushed to say.
“Excellent,” Patrick said, then he smiled.
“But, Patrick!” Sophie gasped. “Surely you can see the recipe for disaster in such a gathering?”
Patrick lifted her chin, his eyes inspecting the fading bruise; it was now the color of an overripe peach.
“Disaster? I think it is a recipe for success,” he added, kissing her chin.
“Do you really believe so, Patrick?” Amelia whispered.
“Stop wringing your hands, Amelia,” Patrick ordered. “Come, we will see what is going on,” he added as he started to walk from the room. “My money is on Letty and Stephen, and although you mother’s behavior has not always been in your best interest, my dear Miss Pette, she still loves you.”
“It terrifies me to think of Stephen in the same room as my mother,” Amelia said, in a wobbly voice. Clutching Sophie’s spare hand, she followed Patrick as he led the small procession down the stairs.
“You have not been introduced to Stephen’s family have you, Amelia?”
Sophie giggled at Patrick’s drawled words; she had met the Sumner Fillies and knew what a handful they could be.
“No,” Amelia said, then froze on the bottom step as she heard voices.
“Timmy, desist in running your sticky fingers through my hair,” Patrick said, as he urged both ladies down the final step and moved to intercept whoever was approaching.
Sophie giggled again as Timmy responded with several garbled words and proceeded to tug on Patrick’s locks. He in turn ignored the small boy and gave Sophie a wink. Lord, how she loved this man.
Stephen appeared first. He moved instantly to Amelia’s side, and his handsome face wore a soft smile as he noted her anxious expression.
“It is all right, my sweet. Lady Carstairs and I have had a long talk with your mother and she has consented to our betrothal.”
“She did?” Amelia gasped.
“Aye, she did, and I have come to take you to her,” Stephen said, slipping a hand around her waist and leading her from the room.
“But is she angry, Stephen?” Amelia asked, and he could hear the fear in her voice.
“No love, she is changed,” he whispered, placing a soft kiss on her lips.
Sophie watched as Stephen and Amelia walked away. With a sigh, she leaned into her husband.
“Are you tired, Sophie?” Patrick said into her hair.
“No,” she whispered, tickling Timmy’s chin and breathing in the very male scent of her husband. “My mother once said to me that all she wanted, for Timmy and me, was a few sunny days and a small measure of happiness, but she held out little hope that we could achieve more. But Patrick …”
“Yes, love.”
“Because of you we have achieved so much more,” Sophie said, then tilted her head back to receive his kiss.
“No love,” Patrick said against her mouth. “It is I who have so much more.”
Photo: Natalie McPherson
Wendy Vella is a lover of all things romantic. She started reading her first Georgette Heyer book at a young age and instantly fell in love with the Regency era. Writing is something she has always found time for; she penned her first novel at eighteen, though she says it will never make an appearance outside the closet in which it currently resides.
After having her two children, Wendy joined RWNZ and started honing her chosen craft by entering competitions with some success and attending conferences.
She has an addiction to reading, and loves a wide range of romance genres, but her first love will always be historical. She relishes novels steeped in romance and excitement, with feisty heroines and delicious heroes, especially when they are set amongst the treacherous waters of London society.
Wendy is a sucker for a happy ending, having secured her own. She has been married to her dark brooding hero for twenty-eight years, and shares her home with two wonderful children, two dogs, and anyone else who happens to be visiting at the time. Born and raised in a rural area on the North Island of New Zealand, Wendy loves the beaches and lush green rolling hills of her homeland, and is proud to call herself a very patriotic Kiwi!
THE EDITOR’S CORNER
Welcome to Loveswept!
We’re delighted to offer you another sizzling e-original next month: From rising romance star Sharon Cullen comes a tale of the fiery passion between a noble naval officer and a female pirate that’s as tempestuous and as unpredictable as the sea. THE NOTORIOUS LADY ANNE is Sharon Cullen’s first historical novel and her debut with Loveswept. Sensual and enticing, this is a book you won’t want to miss.
Also upcoming: Patricia Olney’s irresistible JADE’S GAMBLE, Linda Cajio’s sinfully sexy STRICTLY BUSINESS, and three blazing hot books from Sandra Chastain: A DREAM TO CLING TO, LOVE AND A BLUE-EYED COWBOY, and MAC’S ANGELS: MIDNIGHT FANTASY.
If you love romance … then you’re ready to be Loveswept!
Gina Wachtel
Associate Publisher
P.S. Watch for these terrific Loveswept titles coming soon: March brings Ruthie Knox’s scorching ALONG CAME TROUBLE, and some classic you’ll want to read: Patricia Olney’s moving and funny STILL MR. AND MRS., Juliana Garnett’s compelling and sensual THE BARON, Jean Stone’s exceptional and heartwarming FIRST LOVES, Linda Cajio’s extraordinary UNFORGETTABLE, and beloved author Iris Johansen’s brilliant AN UNEXPECTED SONG. In April, we’re excited about Megan Frampton’s emotional and powerfully erotic tale HERO OF MY HEART, Karen Leabo’s electric HELL ON WHEELS, Linda Cajio’s stirring novels, HE’S SO SHY and DESPERATE MEASURES, and Sandra Chastain’s spellbinding books, NIGHT DREAMS and PENTHOUSE SUITE. Don’t miss any of these extraordinary reads. I promise that you’ll fall in love and treasure these stories for years to come.…
Read on for excerpts from more Loveswept titles …
Read on for an excerpt from Juliet Rosetti’s
Escape Diaries
The Escape Diaries :
A Guide to Breaking Out of Prison
Escape tip #1:
Be prepared.
Actually I wasn’t prepared at all. I just wanted to go to bed. I was tired and cranky, sweat was puddling between my boobs, and my armp
its smelled like sprouting onions. Deodorant cost one ninety-five at the prison canteen, well beyond the means of someone who earned ten cents an hour. Given a choice between M&Ms or Mennen, I’d pick the sweet and live with the stink. Repulsive, yes—but chocolate is what gets you through the day, and no one else smells any better.
If I’d stuck to chocolate, things might have turned out differently. But I had a leftover cough drop from a bout with bronchitis, and when my cellmate, Tina Sanchez, developed a tickly throat, I gave her the cough drop. Just being a pal, right?
Wrong. You’re supposed to return unused medications to the medical director. The staff tracks pharmaceuticals the way the CIA tracks yellow cake in the Middle East. A cellblock officer caught the menthol scent on Tina’s breath and wrote her up for taking a nonprescription drug. Since I was the one who’d dished out the illicit substance, I was written up, too. Along with a bunch of other drug offenders—aspirin pushers, Alka-Seltzer peddlers, and Midol dealers—Tina and I were sentenced to garden detail.
Not exactly the Bataan death march in a suburban peas and petunias plot, but Taycheedah’s gardens are a whole different chunk of real estate. Looking out over them is like gazing at the Great Plains; you wouldn’t be surprised to see buffalo and buzzards roaming around out there.
The first days of September had been sunny and hot, and in the perverse way of growing things, every tomato on six acres had ripened on the same day. Ten thousand of the squishy red things, demanding to be handpicked before thunderstorms swept through and turned them into salsa. We picked. And picked. And picked some more. All morning, all afternoon, and into early evening. When it got to be five o’clock I thought we’d be dismissed for dinner. But no-o. You do the crime, you do the time: that was the warden’s motto. The kitchen staff sent out sandwiches and bottles of water and we ate sitting cross-legged in the dirt. Then we hauled ourselves to our feet and went back to work.
My spine was an archipelago of ache, my skin felt scalded, and my teeth were filmed with bugs. The rank, catnippy odor of tomatoes clung to my clothes. I straightened and stretched at the end of my gazillionth row, rubbing my back and anxiously scanning the sky to the west, which had turned the pus-yellow of a fading bruise. The air was thick enough to stir with a spoon. Crickets chirped storm warnings. Lightning flickered in a raft of distant clouds.
Lightning terrified me. I glanced uneasily at the officer on duty, hoping she’d let the tomatoes go to mush and order us back inside. She didn’t. She just yawned, leaning against a tree, staring glassily into space. Obviously, distant lightning wasn’t high on her list of concerns.
“Did you know that lightning can strike as far as ten miles away?” I said to Tina, who was picking on the opposite side of my row.
“So what?” Tina scoffed. “Your chances of getting hit by lightning are less than winning the Powerball.”
“You’ve got it backward.” The heat was making me cranky. It was Tina’s fault I was on this gulag detail in the first place. “The odds against winning the Powerball are greater than your chances of being struck by lightning.”
“I ain’t never won the lottery and I ain’t never got hit by lightning neither, so that proves my point.”
Tina’s logic made my brain hurt. I opened my mouth to explain her faulty reasoning, which would probably have resulted in Tina’s giving me a mashed tomato facial, but at that moment a siren began to wail. I nearly jumped out of my sweat-streaked skin. Dropping my tomatoes, I clapped my hands over my ears.
“Is that the escape siren?” I asked.
“No, you goober. That’s the tornado siren.”
Tornado? My stomach did a roller-coaster dip. Tornadoes scared me even worse than lightning. What were you supposed to do? In grade school we’d had to practice tornado drills, crouching under our desks with our arms over our heads and our butts in the air. By the time the drill ended, our classroom smelled like a cauliflower factory.
The guard-snapped out of her heat-induced stupor, blew a whistle, and bellowed, “All right, everybody, form up in a line. We’re returning to the main unit. Inside, you will proceed to your designated—”
A galloping wind drowned out her voice, bowled over the tomato plants, and hurled leaves through the air like green rain. The storm blitzed in faster than anyone could have expected. Thunder shook the ground and a zag of lightning split the sky. The mercury vapor lamps that lit the grounds exploded, plunging us into murky gloom.
Disoriented, I grabbed onto Tina and we bumbled around, tripping over vines, squishing tomato guts underfoot, trying to catch our breaths against the scouring gale. The air sizzled with electricity and my hair stood on end. The wind worked itself into a tantrum and slammed us along, Tina’s long braid whipping against my face until she was whirled one way and I was hurled another. I smacked up against the wall of the greenhouse and stepped in a load of peat moss from an overturned wheelbarrow.
Lightning flashed again, turning the world muddy purple. The purple goop spat hail. Split pea hail at first, that sounded like the first faint pops of microwave popcorn, then fist-sized hail that smashed the greenhouse panes and sent shards of glass geysering into the air. A 747 revved for takeoff inside my skull. My ears popped, my hair tried to yank itself out by the follicles, and what felt like a dozen Dustbusters sucked at my clothes. Tree branches and gutter spouts hurtled through the air, outlined by strobes of lightning. Something enormous somersaulted toward me, growing bigger and bigger, blotting out the sky. I stared in disbelief. It was a house! An enormous house was about to smack down and squash me like the Wicked Witch of the East. When the rescue workers came around searching for bodies, they’d discover my feet sticking out from beneath the foundation.
“She really needed a pedicure,” they would say.
I was five years old when I watched The Wizard of Oz for the first time. My parents were out and my older brothers, who were supposed to be babysitting me, had abandoned me. Alone in the house, I poured myself a glass of Kool-Aid, dribbled my way to the TV, and popped a tape into the VCR. I couldn’t read yet, but the video cover showed a girl in a blue dress, a scarecrow, a lion, and a shiny metal man. I plopped down on the sofa, my legs so short they stuck straight out over the edge of the cushions, and watched, entranced, as a girl named Dorothy balanced along a fence, singing a song about a rainbow.
Then Almira Gulch appeared. Eyes like Raisinettes, chin like an ax blade, mouth like a rat trap. By the time she was pedaling her bike through the twister, cackling insanely and transforming into the Wicked Witch of the East, I was petrified, sobbing, and soaked.
My mother came home, switched off the movie, changed my underpants, and put me to bed. I wasn’t allowed to watch The Wizard of Oz again until I was nine years old, presumably old enough to separate fantasy from reality, but even then I had to squeeze my eyes shut when the winged monkeys flew out of the witch’s castle.
Escape tip #2:
Stone walls do not a prison make,
But electrified razor wire
makes a damn fine substitute.
A spatter of rain in my face woke me. Disoriented, I jerked upright, swiping water out of my eyes. Memory returned in jumbled fragments: lightning, wind, hail, a flying house. Had I actually been in the middle of a tornado?
The eerie purple clouds had vanished as the storm roared off east. The air smelled like Christmas trees and the sky had turned that soft, heavenly blue that precedes dark. Bricks, boards, mangled metal, and glass from the shattered greenhouse lay strewn about, sparkling beneath a layer of rapidly melting hail. And there, just a few feet away, was the thing that had struck me. Not a house falling out of the sky, Mazie, you hysterical tornado-phobe—just an old roof the tornado had snatched off a garage or shed. It was lodged against the prison’s perimeter fence, half in and half out of the grounds, as though it’d tried to escape but had been snagged at the last moment.
I took stock of my parts. No broken bones, merely a hard, painful knot about the size of a jawbreaker
on my crown. Just a bump, I told myself. Walk it off, my horrible brothers would have sneered.
Heaving myself to my feet, I eyed the fallen roof. My heart started beating the way it had the first time I’d seen Taylor Lautner take off his shirt in the Twilight movie. I felt woozy. I felt short of breath. I felt terrified that I might be contemplating something stupid.
Shouts came from somewhere close by, puncturing my last-person-on-earth fantasy. Peering out through the jungle of tangled limbs, I glimpsed figures on the grounds. The emergency generators kicked in at that moment. Lights blazed, motors hummed, and current surged through the fence wire in a whispery buzz. I figured I had about thirty seconds before someone spotted me. The whole point of making inmates wear orange jumpsuits on work details is to make them as visible as construction barrels.
Don’t even think about it, I warned myself.
I have never been an impulsive person. You don’t want to be in line behind me at Baskin Robbins because I dither forever trying to choose between Peanut Butter Passion and Mississippi Mud. When I see a sweater I love in a store, I decide to wait until it goes on sale and when I go back my size is gone.
But four years in prison changed that. In prison you don’t have time to weigh the pros and cons of a situation. In prison you listen to your gut. And my gut was telling me go for it! My gut didn’t care that if a single hair came in contact with that fence, twenty thousand volts of electricity were going to surge through my body. My gut didn’t care that I had no clue what I would do if I actually escaped from prison. My gut had become a shoot-first-ask-questions-later type of organ.
Taking a running start, I leaped for the outthrust corner of the roof, snagged a rain-slick shingle, slung a knee up, and shimmied to the peak. I seat-of-my-pantsed down the other side and halted at the far edge. From here to the ground was a two-story drop. Heights are high on my list of phobias, with a scariness rating just below lightning, tornadoes, and those cardboard cylinders of biscuit dough that make a loud pop when you press a spoon against the seam and even though you’re expecting the noise it still makes you jump.
