Dear All, YES! I am getting better from my broken wing and sprained ankle. Sights have NOT been pretty at my house! But I am getting better and can type for a few minutes a day 2-handed!!!! WHEW! What a relief! I have never broken a bone so this has been quite a WILD experience.Do not want to go here again.
On to the good stuff!
FIRST, a reminder to continue allllll the way to the bottom of this post and watch my new trailer for AT HER SERVICE! Come to my own blog too for the introductory excerpt! SLURP! http://cerise.deland.blogspot.com
Introducing my medieval romantica, AT HER SERVICE out Nov. 30 from www.total-e-bound.com, I am delighted to tell you about my newest cherry!
Here, a lovely childless countess must bear an heir—or lose her lands, her honor—and her life. The man sent to sire a child with her is none other than the one who grew up fostered in her father’s castle as a boy—and the man Elise has yearned for lo, all the lonely years since he left.
A taste of AT HER SERVICE!
Circling up, up, up the winding tower that was the back entrance to their private rooms, Elise heard no one behind her. She breathed deeply in relief for that. Simon would not dare to come to them in full view of Alphonse’s retainers and servants. Simon might be under her husband’s thrall, but he would not leave the hall after her and, thus, make the servants aware of what his mission was.
She pushed open her husband’s bedroom door. It creaked, an eerie sound that sent shivers up her spine. But the warmth of the hearth fire, always blazing in the winter’s snow, rushed out to bathe her face and welcome her inside.
“Close the door, Elise.”
At the distinctive husky tone she could still identify after all these lonely years, she paused with one foot upon the threshold. She watched in amazement as Simon unfolded himself from the chair nearest the door and stood to his ungodly height. Anger flooded her at Simon’s impertinence of speaking to her before her husband bid her enter. Her gaze shot to Alphonse who lay beneath a pile of woollens and silks, snoring, his thin face grey, his mouth lax, his once manly frame reduced to a skinny child’s.
Simon took a step forward and extended his hand to the chair opposite his. “Come.” His rough bass voice flowed across the expanse of the chamber like thick molasses over her senses, her body warming to his sensuous tone. Simon’s merest words could entangle and enslave her.
Against his allure , she braced her spine. “How did you get in?”
Mere feet away, she noted how his silver eyes shown like the hard coin he would take for his service to her. “Your husband gave the order to his steward.”
“He should have told me, asked me,” she objected without regard to wake her husband, clenching her fists in fear at Cleve’s knowledge. Her voice bore her outrage that she could not countermand the great earl of Atherton, even as he lay dying in his bed.
Simon strolled forward, his head high, his expression earnest and pleading. Beneath his breath, he spoke to her alone. “The steward put me in the room below.” He nodded towards her alcove and the private winding stairs down to his tiny room. “We must talk.”
“No.” What good was talk? She was chained to Alphonse’s bargain and bound up in a torment wanting Simon de la Poer but knowing she should not have him. Yet she would take him to her to please Alphonse. Aye, and in the taking, she would also surely please herself. She snorted, stepped fully into the cosy apartment and shut the door to the world below.
“You need to know—”
“I want to know nothing.”
“That,” he whispered as he stepped close to her and threaded his long, supple fingers under her wimple up into the coil of her hair, “is a lie.”
She flinched backwards, wrenching to escape his reach. “You must do as I say. Agree or this will not happen at all.”
(Copyright 2009, Cerise DeLand)
Come to my blog for more nibbles: http://cerisedeland.blogspot.com
