Seven Minutes in Heaven

by Eloisa James

  Some time later she turned in his arms and looked with wonder around the room. “Did Marcel help you with these cakes? Where on earth did you find all of them?”

  “Vander, Thorn, and I crisscrossed London to find all of them.” He hesitated. “It was supposed to be a grand gesture.”

  “It is truly a grand gesture,” Eugenia said, awe-struck. She stepped forward to take a closer look at the cake decorated with golden cupids. Each delicacy was more exquisite than the last. And the pedestals were placed at just the right heights to create a perfect display.

  “Lady Xenobia India arranged this room,” she breathed. “No one else has her eye for arrangement.”

  “Mia was here as well,” Ward said, feeling a bit awkward at the mention of his former fiancée.

  “I can’t wait to thank them personally,” Eugenia cried, not looking in the least disturbed by his mention of Mia. “Oh, look at this one!” She reached toward a small cake with a cluster of spun-sugar feathers on top.

  Ward’s arm wrapped around her and pulled her against the muscled planes of his body. “Mia is a romance writer,” he said. “She said I needed to make a grand gesture.”

  Eugenia leaned back against him, inexpressibly happy. “I love your grand gesture.”

  Ward spun her around and their eyes met. “I have something else for you too, from me alone.”

  “Mmmm,” Eugenia murmured. She was surrounded by cakes, and she didn’t want even a single bite. She only wanted him.

  He gave her a kiss that was measured in the rhythm of their heartbeats. By the time Ward pulled back, Eugenia could scarcely think. “A gesture of my own,” he said, his voice husky.

  He reached into his pocket and withdrew . . .

  A cake.

  A small cake, sunk in the middle and cracked on top. It had the surly look that sweet things get when they’ve been baked too long.

  It smelled of chocolate. Burnt chocolate.

  “Did Lizzie make this for me?” she guessed, touching the top. Her heart was singing. Those lovely, eccentric, bright children were going to be hers: Lizzie with her too-old, hopeful eyes, and Otis with his inquisitive bravery and deep love for Jarvis.

  “Not Lizzie.”

  “Otis? I’m impressed!”

  “Nor Otis.”

  She looked up. Her mouth fell open.

  “I couldn’t think of a better way to prove to you that I respect you and adore you—everything about you, Eugenia.”

  “You baked me a cake,” she whispered. It was as if time stopped around them, as if the world had shrunk to a man and woman and a small, burnt chocolate sponge.

  “That’s actually the second one,” he said. The exasperated tone in his voice startled a laugh from her. “The first one shriveled to the size of a walnut. I left Marcel back at Fawkes House because he won’t speak to me any longer, so I had no help.”

  “I love it,” she said, cradling it in her hands. “And I love you.” She came up on her toes and kissed him. His big hands circled her waist, steadying her.

  Their kiss was open-mouthed and open-hearted, the kind of kiss that lays people bare and vulnerable.

  “You are the most witty, beautiful, and warm person I know,” Ward said at length, and his words went straight to her heart. “Lizzie gave up her veil for you, and Otis would have given up Jarvis. We love you, Eugenia. All three of us love you so much. Without you, we’re a family without a heart.”

  He shook his head. “I have to warn you: if you say no to marrying me, you will have to say no again tomorrow, and the day after. I will come back with Lizzie and Otis and Jarvis. You’ll have to say no to Jarvis.”

  “Not Jarvis!” Her fingers traced the classically square shape of his jaw.

  “Will you marry me, Eugenia? Will you be my bride?”

  “Yes,” she whispered back, her voice shaking a bit. “Yes, I will.”

  “Will you promise not to be ladylike?” He was holding her tightly, his face buried in her hair.

  “Not all the time,” she said, unable to stop smiling.

  Epilogue

  Eugenia schooled her expression to the polite curiosity that anyone might feel on encountering a pack of two-legged Dalmatians. Or, to look at it a different way, four spotty children ranging in age from three to fourteen.

  “I can guess that you’ve used India ink to create the dappled effect,” she said to Otis’s best friend, Marmaduke, “but how did you turn your face that sickly white?”

  “Cornstarch mixed with rose water,” he said. “It’s what my nanny uses when she has an afternoon out.”

  “Mama!” Sally was so plumply adorable that Eugenia couldn’t stop herself from bending over and picking her up, despite having already dressed for the evening.

  Sally giggled and rubbed their noses together.

  Eugenia hitched Sally higher on her hip and turned back to Lizzie, Otis, and Marmaduke. Sally laid her head on Eugenia’s shoulder and began sucking her thumb. “Lizzie, I suspect you were the genius behind this.”

  “We were practicing for the event of an infectious disease,” Lizzie replied. “England has been visited by waves of disease for centuries. If we’re caught unprepared, we might all succumb.”

  “I fail to see how drawing spots on everyone’s faces will prepare for a wave of the measles.”

  Otis and Marmaduke, bored of playing at plague, dropped onto the floor and began playing spillikins instead. Sally was blinking, about to fall asleep, her face now mostly clear of cornstarch as it had transferred to Eugenia.

  “I had in mind something rare, not the measles,” Lizzie said, not at all bored. “Something more like the Black Death. An epidemic—that’s what you call it when a great many people die.”

  Sally gave a little sigh and snuggled closer.

  The brilliant intelligence that had made Ward into one of the most successful inventors in England had turned up in a vastly different form in Lizzie.

  As if that thought had drawn him, the nursery door opened and her husband walked in. There was a smile in his eyes when he looked at Eugenia . . . a smile that told her just how much he had enjoyed their morning.

  Sally had been born seven months after they married, leading Eugenia to decide that French letters—no matter the color of ribbons—were clearly not always effective.

  “How wonderful,” her husband had told her, his eyes shining when she told him she was carrying a baby.

  “It would have been a disaster if I hadn’t married you!” she had retorted.

  “I was planning on kidnapping you,” her husband had said unrepentantly. “If you hadn’t succumbed to all those cakes, I was going to toss them in the carriage so I could feed you on the way to Gretna Green.”

  Now he strolled over and kissed his daughter’s cheek. “Generally, this child looks as clean as a newly shelled egg. Not at the moment, though.” He surveyed the speckled crowd. “So who is responsible for all the spots?”

  Eugenia sank into a rocking chair, holding Sally’s warm body tightly against her. Ward had woken her twice the night before—no, that wasn’t fair, because she had turned to him one of those times, waking out of sleep with a desperate hunger for him.

  She closed her eyes, allowing the sound of Ward’s laughter as Lizzie explained the epidemic that had struck the nursery to settle about her like a warm blanket.

  She had two things to tell him, and she was hugging them to her until they sat down to eat together later that night. First, she’d had a letter from Marcel: their venture had just finished its first quarter with an actual profit.

  This was wonderful, but the second bit of news was even better. For all her childhood dreams of living in a neatly ordered household, she was now the mistress of a house that rang with laughter and chaos, in which intellectual curiosity and experimentation ranked far above the propriety she had so yearned for.

  She wouldn’t trade it for a moment—although the baby nestled in her womb would only add to the mayhem.

  Lizz
ie, meanwhile, had moved from lecturing Ward about possible epidemics to telling him about the bird’s nest she’d found that morning, when she stopped and put a finger to her lips.

  Ward turned to find that that his wife and daughter had fallen asleep. Sally was sucking her thumb just as he used to, her cheek nestled against her mother’s shoulder. His heart gave a thump in his ribs that told him, again, how lucky he was.

  Eugenia thought he didn’t know that she was carrying a baby, but he watched everything about her, driven by a gut-deep need to make certain that his wife was well and happy. Her breasts had grown delightfully larger, and she tired more easily.

  She would tell him in her own time, though; he didn’t want to ruin her surprise.

  “She’s having another baby, isn’t she?” Lizzie asked.

  He looked down in surprise as his sister slipped her hand into his.

  “Well, isn’t she?”

  “I think so. Why do you think so?”

  “She’s sleeping,” Lizzie said. “Normally she doesn’t stop moving.”

  “That’s true.”

  “I guessed yesterday, when she didn’t want any trifle. Eugenia never refuses trifle—except when she was carrying Sally.”

  Ward ruffled her hair. “You frighten me sometimes, Miss Lizzie.”

  “Pooh,” his sister said. She kicked Otis’s leg. “Let’s go see the new puppies in the stable before we have to go to bed.”

  Marmaduke leapt to his feet, though Otis just gave his sister a mulish look.

  “Come on, Marmaduke,” Lizzie said, grabbing his hand.

  Ward had the feeling that it would be like that for the next fifty years.

  He took Sally from her mother’s arms and handed her to Ruby before he picked up Eugenia and carried her off to their bedchamber, ignoring her sleepy protests.

  She opened her eyes and smiled at him. “We’ll name him Felix,” she said, before going back to sleep.

  “Felix?” Ward snorted. Not if he had any say in the matter.

  Then he kissed her, and knew that he would let her have her way, because all that mattered was that his family was safe and together. And that he showed this woman every day that his promise of seven minutes, seven minutes in heaven, would be repeated to the very end of their days.

  It would never be enough.

  Naughty Children, Pets Rats, and Pornographic Cigar Boxes

  Seven Minutes in Heaven is the third in a series of novels which feature heroines with unusual professions for the 1800s. India from Three Weeks with Lady X decorates houses; Mia from Four Nights with the Duke writes romance novels; and Eugenia runs a registry for governesses.

  In the process of learning about governesses, I had a lot of fun reading novels about naughty children. Some of Marmeduke’s adventures were inspired by a sequence of 39 books, the Just William series, written by Richmal Crompton between 1921 and 1970. Those of you who have read the Nurse Matilda novels will recognize the speckled children in my epilogue.

  Lizzie’s particular brand of naughtiness—trying to use magic in a vain attempt to control a world that has buffeted her with chaos—comes from an old play by Thomas Middleton called The Puritan, or the Widow of Watling Street. And speaking of old plays, Lizzie is not always right in her quotations, but the plays she quotes are lively and well worth reading.

  The remarkably pornographic cigar box that serves as Jarvis’s bed is a real box, dated approximately 1803; I posted a photo on my website, www.eloisajames.com, under the Book Extras for Seven Minutes. The inspiration for Jarvis is one of my daughter’s pet rats named Teddy. You can find a picture of him there as well, nestled on top of his best friend, who happens to be a large dog.

  One more inspiration I should add: Gunter’s was, by all account, a marvelous establishment. I happily threw myself into exploration of trifles and cakes from the period; the blogger RedHeadedGirl was a big help, sharing recipes from her 1805 edition of The Art of Cookery by Hannah Glasse, as well as a recipe for trifle from a 1769 manuscript.

  One final note . . . If you’ve read A Duke of Her Own, you may realize that Seven Minutes brings one character back from the dead, allowing her to flounce around society once again. We should all be so lucky! But like so many things in fiction, what is so possible on the page is impossible in real life.

  A Note from Eloisa

  Seven Minutes in Heaven is an extraordinary novel for me, in that both Eugenia and Ward appeared in earlier books as children. A number of links to my other novels follow, each of which connects in one way or another to characters from this book.

  In Desperate Duchesses, Ward (known as Teddy at that age) is busily running around the house at night, climbing into other people’s beds. Duchess by Night includes an eccentric, wildly intelligent young girl named Eugenia. The duchess of the title is her future stepmother Harriet, who cross-dresses as a boy to go to a dissolute house party. The Duke of Villiers appears in all six of the Desperate Duchess novels as well as all three of the Numbers series. He duels Ward’s father in the first book, Desperate Duchesses; his own story, A Duke of Her Own, ends with the carriage scene that Eleanor tells Ward about. Finally, Four Nights with the Duke is the first novel in which Ward appears as an adult: if you haven’t read it, the story of Mia’s proposal to the Duke of Pindar, after she is deserted at the altar by Ward (through no fault of his own), is hilariously romantic.

  Acknowledgments

  My books are like small children; they take a whole village to get them to a literate state. I want to offer my deep gratitude to my village: my editor, Carrie Feron; my agent, Kim Witherspoon; my Web site designers, Wax Creative; and my personal team: Kim Castillo, Anne Connell, Franzeca Drouin, and Sharlene Moore.

  People in many departments of Harper Collins, from Art to Marketing to PR, have done a wonderful job of getting this book into readers’ hands: my heartfelt thanks goes to each of you.

  Finally, a group of dear friends (and one teenage daughter) have read parts of this book, improving it immeasurably: my fervent thanks to Rachel Crafts, Lisa Kleypas, Linda Francis Lee, Cecile Rousseau, Jill Shalvis, and Anna Vettori.

  Announcement to Wilde in Love

  Keep reading for a sneak peek at

  WILDE IN LOVE by Eloisa James

  Coming Fall 2017

  Excerpt from Wilde in Love

  Hemingford Castle

  June 28, 1778

  Lord Alaric Wilde, son of the Duke of Hemingford, strode down the long, echoing hall of his father’s castle. His older brother, the Marquess of Northbridge—or North, as he preferred to be called—walked at his side.

  The heir and the spare. The courtier and the explorer. The duke’s best beloved and the disgrace.

  He and his brother were of equal height, with similar features and cut of jaw. But the resemblances stopped there. Had they consciously tried, they couldn’t have been more different.

  “No, I did not bed the empress,” Alaric stated, stopping at the gilt-encrusted mirror hanging in the castle entry to slap a battered, white, powdered wig on his head. He grimaced at the sight. “Maybe I should change my mind and return to her court. At least I wouldn’t have to wear this monstrosity.”

  “Seriously, there’s no truth to the rumor?” North persisted, coming up at Alaric’s shoulder. “Blackwell’s is selling a detailed etching entitled England Takes Russia by Storm. It’s set in the imperial bedchamber, and the fellow looks remarkably like you.”

  Their eyes met in the glass, and North visibly recoiled. “Good God, is that your only wig?” He scowled at the lumpy mound on Alaric’s head. “Father won’t like to see that at dinner. Hell, I don’t like it.”

  The marquess wore a snowy towering creation that turned him into a cross between a parrot dunked in plaster dust and a fancy chicken. Alaric hadn’t seen his brother in four years, and he’d scarcely recognized the man.

  “I came straight from the dock, but I sent my valet into London. Quarles should arrive tomorrow, new wig in hand. Not that
his acquisition will come close to the elegance of yours.”

  North adjusted his cuffs. Pink silk cuffs. “Obviously not, since this wig is Parisian, enhanced by Sharp’s best Cyprus hair powder.” Then he grinned. “But I just don’t believe it. The famous Lord Wilde didn’t bed the empress?”

  “All I’ll say is the opportunity was there,” Alaric said dryly. “She issued a public invitation, in the interests of raising Russian morale.”

  North gave a shout of laughter. “The burden of improving Russian morale would put some pressure on a man’s performance, I’m guessing.”

  “I couldn’t say. I declined the challenge and took the first ship out of Petersburg, which turned out to be damned lucky because here I am, just in time for your betrothal party.”

  “Fearless in the face of a mountain, yet he flees a lascivious empress,” North said. “A sad reflection on England’s greatest adventurer since Sir Walter Raleigh.”

  Just then the family butler, Saxon, walked through the baize door at the rear of the entry and bowed. “Good afternoon, Lord Alaric, Lord Northbridge. The party has assembled in the drawing room.” He moved to the drawing room door, ready to usher them in.

  “Afternoon, Saxon,” Alaric said.

  “One minute,” North said, adjusting his elaborately tied neck scarf in the glass. “A touch of Casanova in your writing wouldn’t go amiss,” he said to Alaric. “Enough with the hardship, woe, and duels with two-headed men. On to randy royalty. If I were you, I would have bedded the empress and called it research.”

  “As soon as you take to the roads and head for Russia, I’ll make an introduction. I’m sure you’d love to bed a woman who addresses you as a badger of delight,” Alaric retorted.

  North let out a crack of laughter. “Badger? Are you sure she didn’t mean stallion? Imagine the book sales for a Stallion of Delight. Not to mention the etchings.”