A Season of Seduction

by Jennifer Haymore

  “Do you miss him?” Meg asked after a moment’s pause.

  “I despise him.” Serena’s voice hissed through the gloom. She blinked away the stinging moisture in her eyes.

  Meg slid her a sidelong glance. “You’ve said that over and over these past weeks, but I’ve yet to believe you.”

  Pressing her lips together, Serena just shook her head. She would not get into this argument with her sister again. She hated Jonathan Dane. She hated him because her only other option was to fall victim to her broken heart and pine over him, and she wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t sacrifice her pride for a man who had been a party to her ruin and then turned his back on her. That would show weakness, and Serena was anything but weak.

  Serena turned her gaze to the bow of the ship. The lantern lashed to the forestay cast a gloomy light, revealing a muddy fog swirling over the lip of the deck.

  Smiling, she turned the tables on her sister. “You miss Mr. Langley far more than I miss Jonathan, I assure you.”

  Meg didn’t flinch. “I miss him very much,” she murmured.

  Of course, unlike her own affair, Serena’s sister’s had followed propriety to the letter. Serena doubted Commander Langley had touched her sister for anything more than a slight brush of lips over a gloved hand. They danced exactly twice at every assembly; he’d come to formally call on Meg at their aunt’s house three times a week for a month. In the fall, Langley was headed to sea for a two-year assignment with the Navy, and he and Meg had agreed, with her family’s blessing, to an extended courtship. He’d done everything to claim Meg as his own short of promising her marriage, and Langley wasn’t the sort of gentleman who’d renege on his word.

  Unlike Jonathan.

  Stop! Serena commanded herself.

  She patted her sister’s arm. “I wager you’ll have a letter from him before summer’s end.”

  Meg’s gray eyes lit up in the dimness. “Oh, Serena, do you think so?”

  “I do.”

  Meg sighed. “I feel terrible, you know.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it seems unfair that I should be so happy and you…” Meg’s voice trailed off.

  “And I am disgraced and ruined, and the man who promised he’d love me for all time has proved himself a liar,” Serena finished in a dry voice. Nevertheless, it hurt to say those words. The pain was a deep, sharp slice that seemed to cleave her heart in two. Even so, Serena hid the pain and kept her face expressionless.

  Meg’s arm slid from her own, and tears glistened in her eyes. Meg knew exactly how Serena was feeling, so it didn’t matter that she struggled so valiantly to mask her feelings. Meg always knew. She always understood. It was part of being a twin, Serena suspected.

  Meg stopped walking and turned to face her. “I’ll do whatever I can… you know I will. There is someone out there for you, Serena. I know there is. I know it.”

  “Someone in Antigua?” Serena asked dubiously. Their aunt had made it quite clear that she would never again be welcome in London. And Meg knew as well as she did that there was nobody for either of them in the island they’d called home since they were twelve years old. Even if there were, she was a debauched woman. No one would want her now.

  “Perhaps. Gentlemen visit the island all the time. It could certainly happen.”

  The mere idea made Serena’s gut chum. First, to love someone other than Jonathan Dane. It was too soon to even allow such a thought to cross her mind, and every cell in her body rebelled against it. Second, to love anyone ever again, now that she was armed with the knowledge of how destructive love could be. Who would ever be so stupid?

  “Oh, Meg. I’ve no need for love. I’ve tried it, and I’ve failed, through and through. A happy marriage and family is for you and Mr. Langley. Me…? I’ll stay with Mother, and I will care for Cedar Place.”

  A future at Cedar Place wasn’t something she’d been raised to imagine—from the moment they had stepped footon Antigua, Serena and her sisters had told one another that this was a temporary stop, a place for the family to rebuild its fortune before they returned to England.

  But now Cedar Place was all they had left, and it was falling into ruin. Before her father had purchased the plantation and brought the family to live in Antigua six years ago, Cedar Place had been a beautiful, thriving plantation. Six months after arriving on the island, Father had died from malaria, leaving them deeply in debt with only their mother to manage everything. And Mother was a well-bred English lady ill-equipped to take on the work of a plantation owner. Serena had doubts Cedar Place could ever be restored to its former glory, but it was the one and only place she could call home now, and she could not let it rot.

  Meg sighed and shook her head. “I just think—Oh!”

  She stumbled, slid, and went down in a flurry of skirts, leaving a glimmering slick of grease in her wake.

  And then the ship dipped down the trough of a wave, and Meg slid beneath the deck rail and disappeared over the edge. As if from far away, Serena heard a muffled splash.

  With a cry of dismay, Serena lunged after Meg until her slippered toes hung over the edge of the deck and she clung to the forestay.

  Far below, Meg flailed in the water, hardly visible in the shadowy dark and wisping fog, her form growing smaller and finally slipping away as the ship blithely plowed onward.

  After living for six years on a small island, Serena’s sister knew how to swim, but the heavy garments she was wearing—oh, God, they would weigh her down. Serena tore off her cloak and ripped off her dress. She kicked off her shoes, scrambled over the deck rail, and threw herself into the sea.

  A firm arm caught her in midair, hooking her about the waist and yanking her back onto the deck. “No, miss. Ye mustn’t jump,” a sailor rasped in her ear.

  It was then that she became conscious of the shouts of the seamen and the creaking of the rigging as the ship was ordered to come round.

  Serena tried to twist her body from the man’s grasp. “Let me go! My sister is out there. She’s… Let me go!”

  But the man didn’t let her go. In fact, another man grabbed her arm, making escape impossible. She strained to look back, but the ship was turning, and she couldn’t see anything but the dark curl of waves and whitecaps, and the swirl of fog.

  “Hush, miss. Leave this one to us, if ye please. We’ll have ’er back on the ship in no time at all.”

  “Where is she?” Serena cried, sprinting toward the stern, pushing past the men in her way, ignoring the pounding of the sailors’ feet behind her. When she reached the back of the ship, she tried to jump again, only to be caught once more, this time by Mr. Rutger.

  She craned her neck, searching in vain over the choppy, dark water and leaning out as far over the rail as the sailor would allow, but she saw no hint of Meg.

  “Never worry, miss,” Mr. Rutger murmured. “We’ll find your sister.”

  The crew of the Victory searched until the sun was high in the sky and burned through the fog, and the high seas receded into gentle swells, the ship circling the spot where Meg had fallen overboard again and again.

  But they never found a trace of Serena’s twin.

  THE DISH

  Where authors give you the inside scoop!

  From the desk of Jill Shalvis

  Dear Reader,

  When I started this series, about three estranged sisters who get stuck together running a beach resort, I decided I was out of my mind. I have a brother, and we like each other just fine, but I don’t have sisters. Then at the dinner table that very night, my three teenage daughters started bickering and fighting, and I just stared at them.

  I had my inspiration! “Keep fighting,” I told them, much to their utter shock. I’ve spent the past fifteen years begging them to get along.

  After that night, it was a piece of cake to write the sisters—Maddie, Tara, and Chloe—with their claws barely sheathed, resentment and affection competing for equal measure.

  All I had left to do t
hen was find the three sexy guys who could handle them.

  It just so happened that, at the time, my neighbor was having an addition put on her house. For six glorious weeks, there were a bunch of guys hanging off the roof and the walls, in a perfect line of sight from my office.

  Which is really my deck.

  So I sat in the sun and wrote while in the background cute, young, sweaty guys hammered and sawed and, in general, made my day.

  And on some days, they even took off their shirts. Those were my favorite days of all. But I digress…

  I was working very hard, planning out conflicts and plot pacing and trying to nail down my hero. And given what I was looking at for inspiration, it shouldn’t be any surprise at all that the hero for this first book in the Lucky Harbor series, SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE (on sale now), turned out to be a master carpenter.

  And a very sexy one at that.

  I’m actually writing book two right now. I keep going out on the deck, sitting and patiently waiting, but my neighbor hasn’t hired any more sexy carpenters. Darn it.

  Enjoy!

  www.jillshalvis.com

  From the desk of Jennifer Haymore

  Dear Reader,

  When Jack Fulton, the hero of A SEASON OF SEDUCTION first entered my office to ask me to write his story, I was a little confused about his motives.

  “Okay.” I stared at him dubiously. “From what you’ve said, it sounds like you met a woman and fell in love. What’s the issue here?” Honestly, I couldn’t figure out why he’d come to me in the first place. I’m here to write about characters with real, serious problems, and his seemed straightforward enough. Actually it didn’t seem like a problem at all.

  “For one thing, she’s the sister of a duke, and I’m a sailor.”

  Hmmm… a Cinderella story in reverse. There might be something here. Yet…

  Frowning, I skimmed through the application he’d laid on my desk. While I had to admit that when he’d walked in I’d gotten a brief vision of the rolling sea, the guy didn’t comport himself like a salty seaman at all. I tapped the papers. “Says here you’re from a distinguished family. Your father and brother both sit in Parliament. You’re a gentleman.”

  Fulton sighed. “By blood, maybe.”

  “Hmm.” I know how thick bloodlines ran in nineteenth-century England. The fact that he was a gentleman from a reputable, wealthy family with noble roots would go far in aiding his bid for a duke’s sister. If he were a chimney sweep or something, it might be different. But I didn’t feel this was quite enough.

  He leaned forward in his chair. “Lady Rebecca doesn’t trust anyone. She doesn’t trust me. And because of that, she pushes me away.”

  “Why doesn’t she trust anyone?” I asked.

  “Because of her previous husband.”

  “What about him?”

  A muscle twitched in Fulton’s jaw, and his hands gripped the chair arms so tightly I could see his knuckles whitening. “William Fisk was a bastard,” he gritted out. “He didn’t love her. He married her for her status and her money. He planned to steal it all away from her.”

  I had to agree, this Fisk dude was a jerk. Poor Lady Rebecca. Still, I couldn’t see the relevance of any of this. I shook my head. “Look, I don’t think this is the story for me. The lady might have some issues with trust, but don’t we all? If she loves you and you love her, you can work it out. I guarantee it.”

  Clearly agitated, Fulton thrust a hand through his brown, sun-streaked hair. He rose and began pacing my tiny office, from one end to the other and back again. I watched him patiently, but secretly hoped he would leave soon. I had a lot of work to do.

  Finally, he spun around, pinning me with dark eyes. “You don’t understand.”

  I shrugged. The issue seemed clear enough to me.

  “There’s a problem. An insurmountable problem.” He stalked toward me, placed his hands flat on my mahogany desk, and leaned forward until his nose was an inch from my own.

  “You see,” he began, his voice quiet but with an edge of something hard and brittle, like a thin sheet of glass about to shatter. “She shouldn’t trust me. She shouldn’t believe a word I say.”

  “Why’s that?” I murmured, staring up into his narrowed, dark eyes.

  “Because,” he said, very, very quietly, “my motives when it comes to Lady Rebecca Fisk are exactly the same as her first husband’s.”

  Once I heard that, I was hooked. I knew I had to take this story on. I invited Fulton back into his chair, and after some arduous work and heavy arguing, we finally hammered out the fair solution to his problem, and A SEASON OF SEDUCTION was born.

  Please come visit me at my website, www.jennifer haymore.com, where you can share your thoughts about my books, sign up for my newsletter and some fun freebies, and read more about the characters from A SEASON OF SEDUCTION.

  From the desk of Annie Solomon

  Dear Reader,

  One of the most interesting things I did for TWO LETHAL LIES (on sale now) was the research. Normally, I don’t enjoy that part of the writing process, but I had some interesting experiences with this book.

  In one scene, for example, I wanted my heroine, Neesy, to disable a car. But she had to do it quickly—before the bad guys could get her—without tools, and in a way that could just as easily be reversed so the car would start once the evil ones were gone. Sound easy? Well, the car was a 1959 Oldsmobile, and I couldn’t find any reliable source, online or off, who could help. So I went to the only experts I knew: Click and Clack, the Tappet brothers from the radio show Car Talk. We had a great time on the air, and they came up with a good solution. But after all that? The scene was cut!

  Although the Net didn’t help with that problem, it was a godsend for others. When I decided to do a section of the book at Disney World, I was a little nervous. I’d been to the park once, but it was years ago; I had only vague memories. But when I went online to see what information I could find, I was amazed. I discovered not only maps and the pictures from the Disney site, but lots of videos taken by visitors themselves, which would be much closer to the experience of my characters. And then I hit the jackpot—a mini-documentary about the secret tunnels beneath the park. That shaped the entire section. And it was so cool to write about something most people don’t know.

  I found lots of other things that helped me set the story of Mitch, his daughter Julia, and his love, Neesy, in reality. The Drake Hotel is a well-known hotel in Chicago—and Princess Diana really did stay there! Hanover House in New York City is based on the Sloan Mansion, a turn-of-the-century home with fourteen-foot ceilings and seventeen bathrooms. I put Roger Carrick in the Omaha-Nebraska section of the FBI so I could write about Muscatine, the small town on the Mississippi that I visited last year. I met lots of great folks and had a wonderful time. And it’s true, as Roger says—corn is everywhere.

  If you’d like to see pictures of the places I’ve been, watch the videos, hear me on the radio—even take a gander at the scene that bit the dust—it’s all on my website, www.anniesolomon.com. Stop by, check it out, and say hello. I’d love to hear from you!

  Happy Reading!