Seductive Starts
Page 72
She shook her head at such whimsy. “We need to make a move. This way.” She reached for his hand and rested it on her forearm. Heat radiated from beneath his grip, though it proved to be a strangely comforting sensation.
In silence, she led him to her horse, then stilled. How were they to do this?
It was as if he read her mind. “You mount first, then I’ll follow.”
Want to read more? The Highwayman’s Bride by Jane Beckenham is available now.
Her Wicked Sin
Sarah Ballance
Henry Dunham comes to Salem on a mysterious errand, but is thrown from his horse and rescued by the local Puritan midwife, Lydia Colson. Lydia is running from her own dark secrets, pretending her dead husband is simply…away. When she and Henry are caught in a compromising situation, one punishable by Puritan law, he saves her from scandal by claiming to be her errant spouse…and claiming her bed. As their lies become truths, a witch hunt threatens their burgeoning love, and Lydia’s life.
HIS WORDS LEFT HER without speech. Never had she known such kindness, and his soft assurances weakened her.
“What is it?” he asked. He studied her with such thoroughness she wondered if he did not see her every thought.
“You said man has many layers.”
“Woman as well.”
“Your layers, Henry,” she said with softness. “What do they hide?”
“Firstly, the kind of need that will give a man a limp.”
He spoke with such quiet regard she nearly missed his pun. “You refuse all seriousness,” she admonished.
“I speak the truth.” He removed his hands from her shoulders where upon they rested and gently worked free the fasteners of her outer coat. “Shall I help you with your coat?”
Lydia nodded before she lost the nerve, for the knot in her stomach surely sensed more than she. Henry was a most handsome man—rakish in appearance, but with a gentleman’s charm—and certainly virile as she could attest from her observations of the night prior. The mere thought of his fulfillment left her hot and weak, though her body responded with strength and a deep ache.
His russet eyes had darkened, though she blamed not the waning light of day. The fire roared, tending well the pottage and casting bountiful, dancing coloration in the modest room. And there, as if the most routine of activities, stood a man—her husband—with his strong, supple fingers removing her coats as if he had been born to do that very thing.
Once he’d relieved her from the burdens of her outer layers, they were both cast into stillness. The crack and bend of the fire could not equal the trumpet of her heart.
She was his wife. And for the first time in her life, thoughts of her matrimonial duty filled her not with fear or tumult, but with a kind of burning desire that made her revisit the innocence of girlhood. His hesitance made him neither confident nor timid, but rather a gentleman. Though he could rightfully claim her body as he had her hand, he withheld—whether or not for consideration of her past hurts, it mattered not. He, stranger and husband, put her first.
He stepped forward, lessening the gap between them to half an arm’s length. “May I?”
She knew not what he asked, but nodded her permission. And so he reached for her bonnet, untied the strings, and cast the garment aside.
“When we join,” he said, “I shall be humbled to see your beauty in its most natural state.” His words came from calm, though something passionate simmered very near his surface as he reached to untie her hair, then arranged it loose about her face. He leaned forward, closing the small distance between them, and pressed his cheek to hers, breathing deeply.
The sensation of his early beard hairs against her softer cheek brought forth a rampant want. Never had she fired so hotly nor been treated with such tenderness. Though she wanted not to rush the moment, his every attention left her watery with an unfamiliar strength of desire—one she desperately hoped he would fulfill.
Summoning every bold bit of her nature, she sought with both hands his doublet and began working the fasteners.
He borrowed another deep breath, this one pulling over the flesh of her neck in a soft, needy moan. “I fear you will withhold me, lovely Lydia. Are you sure this is what you want?”
“I want nothing more.”
Want to read more? Her Wicked Sin by Sarah Ballance is available now.
Other Books by Courtney
The Worth Saga
Coming late 2014
click here to find out more
The Brothers Sinister Series
The Governess Affair
The Duchess War
A Kiss for Midwinter
The Heiress Effect
The Countess Conspiracy
The Suffragette Scandal
Talk Sweetly to Me
The Turner Series
Unveiled
Unlocked
Unclaimed
Unraveled
Not in any series
What Happened at Midnight
The Lady Always Wins
The Carhart Series
This Wicked Gift
Proof by Seduction
Trial by Desire
Unveiled Enhanced Content
Q. Where did you get the idea for Unveiled?
A. I’m going to let Tessa Dare explain that.
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Interview with Tessa Dare (1:37)
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Parford Manor
I used Montacute House in Somerset as my guide for Parford Manor. In particular, I described Parford Manor as being built with stone from the same quarry—a gorgeous honey gold stone that shines in the sunlight.
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The Long Gallery
In Parford Manor, there’s a gallery mentioned—a long room where portraits hang. I modeled this after the long gallery in Montacute—it takes up much of the top floor.
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The Gardens
I mentioned that I modeled Parford Manor after Montacute house. I’d always imagined that Parford Manor had more extensive gardens than the one at Montacute house, but there are some parts in back where roses mix with garden paths and adorable little structures.
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About Ash’s fortune
Q. How exactly did Ash make all that money?
A. Ash made the first part of his fortune—a few thousand pounds—in India. He built the rest of his empire once he got back with that seed money.
The only thing I say in the book itself is that he traded rubies. I always imagined that Ash built his empire by learning to speak the local languages and getting a reputation for trading fairly… Which I very quickly figured out was my attempt to sanitize the getting of his wealth as much as I could. How fairly can you trade with people when your fellow countrymen are forcibly occupying their territory? Doesn’t matter how nice you are about it. It’s still money made on someone else’s spilled blood.
There are very few ways to make money in the nineteenth century that aren’t plain horrible in some fashion. Anyone who made money in international dealings was exploiting imperial positions and/or the slave trade. (Even if they didn’t traffic in slaves personally, trading indigo, sugar, rum, cotton…anything created by slave labor, really, would be problematic.)
Making money against the backdrop of the British Empire—however you sanitize it—almost certainly involved some degree of highly problematic behavior.
So the answer to the question is that Ash made money the way many of his countrymen did. He was nice about it, and never personally killed anyone, but he doesn’t deserve cookies for that.
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Ash & consent
Q. When Margaret tells Ash to leave her alone and he does, it goes against the common romance trope in which
masculine persistence is expected to wear down feminine resistance. Did you deliberately intend to meet that trope head-on?
A. Nope. I definitely did not intend that.
When I first got the idea for Unveiled, I had planned that Ash was going to be a very typical alpha male.
I have proof: I write books out of order, see, so one of the very first things I wrote (sometime in 2008) was a scene (not in the book any longer, for obvious reasons) where Ash kisses Margaret. Here it is:
She gathered that preternatural calm about herself. Despite her pale beauty, it descended on her like a cloak of darkness. And he wanted to crack it, to shake it up, to make her respond with something other than the mere hint of a whisper.
He strode forward until he bracketed her against the wall. Her calm slipped, just a tad. Ash reached down and touched her face. Her cheek was warm and soft in his hand, and her lips parted just a fraction. She said not a word, though—just looked up at him.
“Please,” she said. “Don’t—”
But he did. He wanted her, and by damn, he was going to kiss her. He caught up her words before she could finish her sentence—before she could thrust him from her company, with another perfectly cutting speech. He tasted her lips against his. And she did not hold back; instead, she kissed him back, her body molding itself to his instantly, her hands on his shoulders. She tasted of sweet pleasure and perfect harmony. His hand drifted down her face, down the line of her jaw, to dabble in the hollow of her neck. He could feel her pulse slamming against his fingers, and he dared to move it lower, to play with the scalloped neckline of her gown. Lower, still, to ease the fabric down over the bud of her nipple, to feel it harden as he drank her desire from her mouth—
She set her hands against his chest and shoved him, hard. “Don’t,” she gasped. And before he could open his mouth to argue—before he could say a single word—she finished the sentence he’d interrupted with his kiss. “Don’t make me feel. I can’t bear it.”
So that’s Ash as I initially planned him.
And then someone (@redrobinreader) on Twitter complained that she was annoyed that in every historical romance, the hero tells the heroine how turned on he is by her pale, white skin.
Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with pale, white skin. But when it’s the only color that gets praised, that’s messed up. And…you notice that line above about pale beauty? Guilty as charged. That one comment made me take a step back and look at myself. I started writing a conversation between Ash and Margaret where he tells her to take off her hat if she doesn’t like it, and when she complains about how she’ll brown, he tells her this:
Do you know why my peers want their brides to have pale skin?… They want a woman who is a canvas, white and empty. Standing still, existing for no other purpose than to serve as a mute object onto which they can paint their own hopes and desires. They want their brides veiled. They want a demure, blank space they can fill with whatever they desire.
I hadn’t expected to write that. I hadn’t planned to write it. But when I did, it felt right in a way that nothing I had ever written before had. Writing those words changed Ash, changed the book, changed what I write about, and changed who I am as a writer.
I didn’t subvert the trope. The anti-trope subverted me.
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The Turner family motto
Q. Mark chooses Nequam quidem sumus as the family motto. What does this mean?
A. I asked my brother-in-law to translate “We’re up to no good” into Latin. There wasn’t a direct translation, and so we settled on something that means something like, “We are totally worthless.” Said tongue in cheek, it still seemed appropriate.
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Ash’s views on social class
Q. Is Ash’s rejection of class because of his bad experience with Parford, something influenced by his travels, or something else?
A. I think it’s just bemusement on his part. He’d been treated poorly when people thought he was just a grunt to be used for mindless labor. He’s been treated well when people think he’s a duke’s rightful heir. He knows that he’s still the same person.
It’s not that Ash rejects class; he knows that it exists and that it shapes peoples’ lives. Obviously he has seen that happen himself.
But he thinks it’s a collective delusion held by people, simply because he’s been classified at both the high and the low end of things. When people start kissing his butt, he thinks they’re crazy.
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The Duke of Parford
Q. Why is the Duke of Parford such a big jerk?
A. At base, the Duke of Parford has never wanted, and rarely needed, to care about anyone other than himself, and it shows.
A few things have aggravated his mean tendencies. He was in love (such as these things are) with his first wife and he was bitter about his parents shipping her off. He spent decades mourning her (and also being pissed off that he didn’t get to win). In the end, when he married a second time, he felt even more bitter about the woman he ended up marrying.
But he’s particularly a jerk—and almost childishly so in Unveiled—because of his medical history. Throughout the book, he’s having an ongoing series of transient ischemic attacks (sometimes called mini-strokes). Some of the things that he does—like when Margaret accuses him of making faces at the maids—are involuntary reactions on his part. He’s not making faces; he has temporarily lost control over his facial muscles. His refusal to fess up to this is entirely fear-based. He has little enough control over his life; he’s not about to admit that he’s not in control all the time.
In addition, the initial stroke that he had messed up his brain, resulting in some fairly severe personality changes. He’s petulant and childish because sometimes that happens to people who have strokes. We all have elements of our personality that are not very nice, but we’ve also learned to moderate those impulses and not go with our first, most selfish responses. The part of Parford’s brain that allows him to moderate exactly how much of a jerk he is has been damaged.
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About Ash’s dyslexia.
Q. What made you decide to give Ash dyslexia?
Your eBook reader software does not support the playing of audio. If you’d like to play this audio clip on your computer or read a transcript, please visit http://www.courtneymilan.com/enhanced/unveiled.php
Courtney explaining why Ash is dyslexic (1:06)
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Margaret on social class
Q. Margaret thinks about how prior to being named a bastard she had assumed everything in life was her due. Did she undergo a huge ideological shift or was it more that she had never thought about it before at all?
A. She had never thought about it before.
If everyone told you from birth that you were awesome and the greatest and the best, it would be hard to question it and say, “You know, maybe I am not one hundred percent awesome!”
Margaret undergoes the exact opposite experience that Ash does—transforming from a duke’s treasured offspring to a menial servant. Suddenly, all the super-judgey things that she has ever thought about people of her station (and she’d thought a lot of them) apply to her.
Being judgey about herself is not fun for her.
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Ash on his brothers
Q. Ash is extremely perceptive and yet seems completely out to sea with regard to his brothers. Is it only guilt causing this blind spot or something else?
A. I think sibling blindness is really, really common. You grow up with someone. You think you know them. You do know them, because you have that grounding of common experience…but that means that you can sometimes just be unaware of how they’ve changed. It’s really hard to see who your siblings have become as adults.
I know a lot of really perceptive people who fundamentally cannot figure out their brothers and sisters.
With Ash, thi
s is a double problem, because while he’s their brother, he also basically stepped into the role of parent. He has a really hard time letting go of that role as protector. He has a hard time stepping back and being a friend and a brother—and admitting that he needs protection, too.
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Ash’s response to Margaret’s deception
Q. In many romances, the Big Reveal of a deception causes feelings of betrayal between the couple, but here the conflict is mostly external even after Margaret reveals her true identity. Why did you make that choice?
A. Can you imagine Ash admitting he was wrong about Margaret?
Yeah, neither can I.
I just can’t see Ash being Ash and also getting angry with Margaret.
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Ash’s instincts
Q. Have Ash’s instincts ever led him truly and fully astray?
A. Of course they have. He’s not magic.
Ash probably wouldn’t admit that this has happened, though. He’s fairly invested in his view of himself, and he’s right a huge percentage of the time, but not always. Usually, when he’s wrong, it’s because he fails to notice that the world does not revolve around him.