Marquesses at the Masquerade(121)
Ye gods, ye Norse, Greek, and Roman gods and goddesses.
“I like that,” Tyne said as Lucy’s hand smoothed over his backside. “I think you left claw marks there.”
How smug he sounded. “Don’t gloat.” Lucy pinched him in the same location, and he laughed. “What a wonderful sound,” she said. “My lover’s laughter.”
He eased from her and crouched on all fours, passing her a handkerchief from the night table. When had he thought to put that there?
“You’ll need sustenance now,” he said, climbing from the bed and strutting into the sitting room. “I’ll need sustenance. I am her ladyship’s devoted lover.”
He was also—yet another surprise—unselfconscious about his nakedness. What a delightful quality in a husband and lover.
The smile he wore as he brought Lucy the tray from the other room was frequently in evidence in the ensuing weeks, months, and years, the smile of a happy, much-loved Viking. He wore an even more tender smile when—forty weeks to the day after the wedding—she presented him with little Thor.
And little Freya.
And all the rest of the Tyne pantheon who came after the twins. The first time Sylvie was permitted to hold her baby siblings, she declared them even better than a blue unicorn, in which opinion, even her sister (who had begun to put up her hair) concurred.
Greetings, Dear Reader!
I hope you enjoyed Tyne and Lucy’s tale of moonlit kisses and plans gone awry. There’s just something about a guy with a sledgehammer, isn’t there? In my next novella collection, No Dukes Allowed (May 2018), our hero isn’t packing big tools, and neither does he have a title. How architect Alexander Morecambe thinks he’s going to win the hand of Eugenia, Dowager Duchess of Tinsdale, I do not know. (Excerpt below—might contain a few hints.)
If you’re in the mood for a full length romance, my fourth Windham Bride, A Rogue of Her Own, just came out in March. Charlotte Windham has met her match in Lucas Sherbourne—but has she met the love of her life? If you haven’t read this one, the ordering links are here.
I’m also working on another True Gentlemen, My Own True Duchess, which will come out in June. This is the story of Jonathan Tresham, a charm-deficient ducal heir, who gets tangled up with Theodosia Haviland, a widow with little tolerance for self-important aristocrats. She needs a goodly sum of money, though, and Jonathan needs to outwit the matchmakers, before they choose the wrong duchess for him. Necessity is the mother of happily ever afters? Excerpt below.
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Happy reading!
Grace Burrowes
From Architect of My Dreams by Grace Burrowes in
No Dukes Allowed
* * *
Adam Morecambe has good reasons for keeping his distance for titled society, and yet, when it comes to Eugenia, Dowager Duchess of Tindale, distance is the last thing on Adam’s mind. He’s an architect, and even though he knows better, when it comes to Genie, he’s building a castle in the air…. So why is she lowering the drawbridge, just for him…?
A sharp rap on the parlor door startled Adam from dreams of carved wooden flowers and freckled geese. His boots dropped to the floor, nearly clobbering an indignant marmalade cat.
“Where did you come from?”
The cat squinted, and the knock sounded again, more firmly.
“Come in.”
The Duchess of Tindale presented herself, looking as feminine and pleasing as she had in Adam’s dreams, but wearing a good deal more clothing. He rose from behind the desk, holding his unfinished sketch in a manner that hid the evidence of his wayward imagination.
“Mr. Morecambe.” She popped a brisk curtsey. “I’m looking in on you, as a hostess ought to. Do you have all you need to make your sketches?”
“I apparently needed a nap,” he said. “That is a diabolically comfortable chair.” He shrugged into his coat as casually as he could, though Her Grace had been married. A man in dishabille would hardly shock her.
“I have remarked the same on the occasion of tending to my ledgers,” she said. “The combination of accounting and that chair induces sleep even first thing in the morning. I’ve sent off a note to Petworth House.”
Petworth was the finest collection of interior woodcarving in all of England, possibly in all the world.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I hope Friday suits your schedule. Godmama’s gardener vows the weather will hold fair for the rest of the week. We can make a picnic of the outing.”
She was inviting him on a tour of Petworth. Also a picnic.
With her.
On the occasion of Adam’s first encounter with the duchess, he’d swept her into his arms to spare her a soaking. The contact had startled him. He’d not held a woman closely for ages, hadn’t wanted to. His every spare moment and thought went to building his business, and he liked it that way. Her Grace had tolerated the embrace for exactly two instants before she’d righted herself and shaken her skirts, but they had been lovely instants.