Jenny Gardiner
About Jenny
Jenny Gardiner is the #1 Bestselling Kindle author of the novel Slim to None and the award-winning novel Sleeping with Ward Cleaver. Her latest works are the It’s Reigning Men series, featuring Something in the Heir, Heir Today Gone Tomorrow and Bad to the Throne, Love is in the Heir, and the upcoming Shame of Thrones. She also published the memoir Winging It: A Memoir of Caring for a Vengeful Parrot Who's Determined to Kill Me, now re-titled Bite Me: a Parrot, a Family and a Whole Lot of Flesh Wounds; the novels Anywhere but Here; Where the Heart Is; the essay collection Naked Man on Main Street, and Accidentally on Purpose and Compromising Positions (writing as Erin Delany); and is a contributor to the humorous dog anthology I'm Not the Biggest Bitch in This Relationship. Her work has been found in Ladies Home Journal, the Washington Post, Marie-Claire.com, and on NPR’s Day to Day. She has worked as a professional photographer, an orthodontic assistant as well as a publicist to a United States Senator (where she first learned to write fiction). She's photographed Prince Charles (and her assistant husband got him to chuckle!), Elizabeth Taylor, and the president of Uganda. She and her family now live a less exotic life in Virginia.
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Stay tuned for more stories from Monaforte, with book five of the It’s Reigning Men series, Shame of Thrones, coming December 16, 2015. Available now for pre-order.
Read on for a sample of Book five of the It’s Reigning Men series:
SHAME OF THRONES
Chapter One
CLEMENTINE Squires-Thornton knew her mother would absolutely kill her if she found out what her daughter was about to do. And if her mother didn’t manage to finish her off, surely her brothers Darcy, or the hot-tempered Eduoardo, certainly would.
But she had no intention of letting an attack of conscience or even a little familial-induced fear stop her now, which she repeatedly told herself in mantra-like fashion as she climbed atop the sticky bar on the legendary party boat the Willy-T, and laid down on her back, wearing only a floral-print string bikini bottom and a broad smile. That she tried to cover her exposed breasts with her long, wavy blonde hair was completely ridiculous. After all, she was clad just about as far opposite of how she’d dress for the Trooping of the Colors or the Queen’s birthday or any other royal occasion as she could ever imagine. Modesty at this point was futile.
She’d already far exceeded any sort of usual behavior for her when she’d buckled to a little self-induced peer pressure and ditched that bikini top before she jumped off the upper deck of the steel sailboat into the warm water below, a tradition for revelers at the famed sailboat-cum-bar anchored in the Bight at Norman Island in the British Virgin Islands. But everyone else was doing it, and she figured when in Rome...
Clementine wasn’t the type to readily disrobe in public. Probably not one to do so quite willingly in private either, for that matter, unless of course with the right person. As the daughter of a marquess, a nobleman in the small European principality of Monaforte, she was raised to observe strict protocol, and being bare-breasted with a bunch of drunken revelers—strangers, at that—just wasn’t part of the program.
As it was, her best friend Pippa Grimaldi would about die if she knew what Clem was up to. But Clementine rationalized that it was partly Pippa’s fault she found herself in this predicament. After all, Clem had hastened her good friend off to the Caribbean for a last-minute surprise reunion with Prince Christopher—Topher for short—with whom Pippa had a brief fling at his brother Prince Adrian’s wedding. The two had a falling out, and Clementine took it upon herself to fix that, deciding that playing matchmaker was a great way to get her mind off of the recent loss of her beloved father. But once she got Pippa to the tropical paradise, she’d resolved that she was all for playing the Vegas card during this little getaway: what happened in the BVI was simply going to stay in the BVI, and maybe a little less-than-regal behavior was just what she needed to shake up her life a bit.
Which meant she’d be stepping way, way out of her comfort zone because, well, why the hell not? If there was one thing she took away from her father’s sudden passing, it was that life was short, and sometimes you just had to throw caution to the wind and live a little.
So it was most convenient when she hit it off with Topher’s skipper Sebastian Chevalier, who happened to be his cousin as well. And Sebastian, it seemed—with his wind-tousled light brown hair and sun-kissed highlights that framed a gorgeous tanned face and warm, brown eyes—was just what the therapist ordered. Or at least the therapist would have done so, had he realized how much Sebastian’s presence set Clementine’s pulse on overload and got her mind off of her woes.
The two readily conspired to ensure that Pippa and Topher would be alone as much as possible, which meant they, too, got plenty of alone-time right from the start. After spending the afternoon snorkeling in the aquamarine Caribbean waters, they’d had great fun fixing a meal for the four of them in the boat’s galley kitchen.
Following dinner, Clementine and Sebastian had removed themselves for the evening from the sailboat they were sharing with Pippa and Topher in the hopes of helping to rejuvenate the couple’s stalled romance that had fizzled after Adrian’s wedding. Which is how Clementine found herself nearly naked atop a bar in a dive bar.
Perhaps the two Painkillers she’d consumed in the past hour or two on top of the wine at dinner had contributed to the diminishing of her standards. But they tasted quite delicious, and fed into her overall warm feeling of being in a lovely place with a lovely man drinking downright lovely drinks. Perhaps they were called Painkillers for a reason. So even though she found herself nearly naked atop a bar, Pippa was hardly even embarrassed. Well, okay, maybe she was squinting shut her cerulean blue eyes, because, yeah, there were a lot of people cheering Sebastian on, and really, she was, after all, pretty exposed. But every now and then she’d open them and look into his eyes and it weirdly instilled a confidence in her.
So when the crowd began cheering for him to peel off her bikini bottoms, she barely flinched. Hell, she’d seen other women do the same thing earlier in the night, so it’s not like she was alone in this behavior. For that matter, there was a line of women waiting for her to finish. It was practically socially acceptable, a veritable cultural norm, right?
The next thing she knew Sebastian was catching the string of one side of her bikini bottoms between his beautiful, straight, white teeth, and ever-so-slowly pulling the strand toward him. And before she knew it, one side of her suit gave way as the crowd whooped and hollered loudly. The other side was a little trickier, and Sebastian had to lean across her taut stomach and with his mouth repeat what he’d done on the other side, which he did with surprising deftness. With great encouragement from the crowd, what happened next was a bit more than Clementine was prepared for, as he used his teeth to edge the front part slightly down to the accompanying roar of approval from the audience that had gathered, though he stopped short of pulling the thing off altogether. Thank goodness for tender mercies.
Her thoughts raced through her mind: first, thank God she’d gotten a fresh waxing before embarking on her Caribbean adventure, but then, holy crap, here she was just about naked in front of a bunch of extremely drunken revelers—were they snapping off pictures and video on their iPhones?—not to mention the extremely handsome and charming Sebastian. But denial kicked in, which kept her from jumping off the bar and fleeing into the water and away from this scene, and instead she closed her eyes and let the Painkiller work its magic, as she repeated in her mind again and again: what happens in the BVI...
Before she knew it, the bartender had poured a shot of local favorite Pusser’s rum into her navel, and Sebastian, who she’d known for roughly, oh, maybe a half a day at that poin
t, proceeded to slurp the liquor off of her body as if they’d been intimate for ages. Which, bizarrely, felt absolutely perfect to Clementine.
It was a good thing her family was never going to learn about this.
Chapter Two
SEBASTIAN could not believe his good fortune. He was thrilled enough when Clementine had boarded their sailboat earlier in the day. He knew the woman was bringing Topher’s fling down to the BVI to try to buoy up the couple’s nascent romance, but he hadn’t expected her to be so beguiling. Athletic and gorgeous with long, lean legs and a beautifully-proportioned body, she was far more than he could have hoped for as a guest on his forty-foot catamaran. At the time, he could barely contain images that kept popping into his mind of her down on her knees, taking him into her mouth, peering up at him with those blue, blue eyes, that long blond ponytail bobbing as she worked—he was a guy, after all. But he knew there wasn’t much chance of that. After all, he’d never even met the woman before. Plus she was here on business of sorts.
Yet fast-forward a few short hours and first she shocks him by following protocol on the party boat the Willy-T and removing her bikini top before jumping into the water below, and now she was spread out before him on top of the Willy-T bar, and he’d managed to peel off most of what remained of her bathing suit in a pretty erotic little scene, despite the crowd of cheering partiers surrounding the two of them. It took all the restraint he could muster to not remove the thing altogether. Nevertheless, here he was now, using his tongue to lick a shot of rum from her belly button. If he’d have been in Vegas, this would be the equivalent of three dollar signs in a row on a slot machine. Jackpot, indeed.
As he leaned over to suck the liquid off of her body, he glanced up, his eyes making contact with hers just past those spectacular breasts he’d tried not to overtly ogle since she’d removed her top before taking the plunge. He’d spent many a night at the Willy-T, but never had he had the great pleasure of accompanying the most beautiful woman on board, let alone be the one to partake in extremely sexy body shots with.
Sebastian couldn’t exactly hide his pleasure, what with him still wearing his swimming trunks from earlier that had tented up on the front. At least he was facing the bar, so a little less obvious. Plus he was grateful they were somewhat loose, as opposed to the usual European-style “root suit” swimwear, which he opted not to use while in the Caribbean.
As he finished the long, slow sensual lapping of the first shot, he fought all of his brain’s urging to just keep moving that tongue to even more interesting spots on her body. But then the bartender did the damnedest thing: he drizzled rum across Clementine’s breasts and the gauntlet was thrown.
Sebastian looked at her rack, then looked into her eyes, and she gave a small nod, which he took as permission enough. He leaned forward and first licked the rum that had trickled down toward the base of her neck, beginning a trail along her cleavage. The crowd went nuts in the background, but he managed to tune them out quite readily as his tongue worked its way across first one nipple, then the other, lapping and circling and making sure he got up every last drop of liquid. After all, he didn’t want to leave behind a sticky mess. As much as he wanted to settle his mouth over one of those things and just spend some time sucking, he thought that would be going a little overboard considering they’d just met that afternoon, so he opted out.
He glanced up at Clementine who smiled as if she was actually enjoying herself, which made him grin back at her with a sly wink.
Of course the bartender wouldn’t stop there. In between pours he and his fellow bartenders were refilling drinks in record time, with a crowd that wanted more, more, more. And he clearly planned to give it to them, because before Sebastian could blink, the bottle of rum was hovering just above her pelvis. Sebastian gulped. Now this was nothing he’d ever expected to be doing in front of a crowd.
He leaned over and whispered into Clementine’s ear.
“I’m okay if you’re ready to call it a night.”
Clem turned her head to him.
“Kiss me,” she said so that only he could hear her.
Sebastian wasted no time pressing his lips to hers as his tongue reached out, searching for hers. As much as he wanted his hands to explore all of those exposed parts of her, he didn’t want to grope her in front of all of those people. Which was a little weird considering he’d already licked around the better half her body, so go figure. Instead he threaded his fingers through her hair, massaging her scalp with his nails as their mouths met.
When they both came up for air, Clementine whispered to him.
“You swear to God no one will ever know about this?”
Sebastian shrugged.
“Neither of us knows anyone in this place, right? I can’t imagine how it would get out. These people are all visitors on holiday: just ships passing in the night, never to be seen again. Besides, people do this all the time here. It’s not as if it’s something outrageous or unusual.”
The two laughed at that one. Sebastian knew that this was so beyond scandalous for someone like Clementine, it was almost socially acceptable. She’d been repeating aloud all evening that life was short, and sometimes it was okay to just do stupid things.
They both looked at the bartender and finally Clementine gave another barely discernable nod, and he began to pour.
~*~
Shame of Thrones
coming December 16, 2015.
Available now for pre-order!
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Also by Jenny Gardiner
Confessions of a Chick Magnet
Skirt Chaser (Coming Soon)
Falling for Mr. Wrong
Falling for Mr. Wrong
Falling for Mr. Maybe
Falling for Mr. No Way In Hell
Falling for Mr. Sometimes
Falling for Mr. Right
It's Reigning Men
Something in the Heir
Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow
Bad to the Throne
Love is in the Heir
Shame of Thrones
Throne for a Loop
It's Getting Hot in Heir
A Court Gesture
It's Reigning Men - Books 1 - 3
The Royal Romeos
Red Hot Romeo
Black Sheep Romeo
Red Carpet Romeo
Blue Collar Romeo
Silver Spoon Romeo
Blue-Blooded Romeo
Big O Romeo
Standalone
Sleeping with Ward Cleaver
Where the Heart Is
Accidentally on Purpose
Compromising Positions
Naked Man on Main Street
Bite Me - A Parrot, a Family, and a Whole Lot of Flesh Wounds
Anywhere but Here
Slim to None
Watch for more at Jenny Gardiner’s site.
Love is in the Heir Page 15