#MidWeekTease with brandy, a knife, a brandy, and an idiot.

Hi all and welcome to #MidWeekTease

This week I'm teasing from my upcoming release The Duke's Temptation

It's on preorder from Totally Bound from 19th September 

Whenever had a knife twirled so fast it became a vicious, glittering blur of metal?

Never.

Gibb Alford, The Duke of Menteith had expected to be bored. Or on guard from any female who had somehow wangled her way into the spectacular. Or, although he devoutly hoped it wouldn’t be so, both. Not that any woman should be there, but he was by now much too cynical to expect what should be so, to actually be thus.

What he also didn’t envisage was this unfamiliar tug of arousal directed towards the main act of the night. Who was a female, although he presumed, an invited one. And seemingly stirred his senses.

Gibb didn’t do arousal. Not now. Or he amended silently, he hadn’t. He stood on the terrace, amidst his peers but alone, a glass of the finest French Brandy in his hand, and watched the Chinese firecrackers and flaring sconces set around the lawn vie with the moon and stars for brightness, and willed his body to behave. Not for the first time he wondered what he was doing there. Why wasn’t he at home on his beloved Scottish estate? At times being a conscientious peer was annoying to say the least.

Someone bumped into him, and apologised as Gibb scowled. He didn’t want his concentration spoiled, or his brandy spilled.

 As the man swayed, Gibb held his goblet out of the way. Good brandy was not to be wasted. With a sardonic smile on his face, Gibb watched the man stumble away, miss the fish pond by inches and lurch round a statue, before he ignored him and instead turned his attention back to what was happening on the lawn. Only to tug at his suddenly too tight cravat because of what he saw in front of him. In the middle of the perfectly manicured, luscious grass, a wooden platform had been erected in front of a large, plain white, thick canvas screen. A curvaceous, raven-haired beauty, dressed in something akin to a shift with slits up each side stood before it.

The illusion of material not really there was very clever, Gibb mused. The flesh coloured silk that swung loosely from her shoulders matched her skin, so you couldn’t see where one finished and the other began. Her lustrous hair swung loosely over her shoulders in a riot of curls, and sparkling jewels hung from her ears and around one ankle, just above one of a pair of flimsy sandals. In her left hand she held a wicked looking knife—a stiletto he noticed—now still and unmoving. Even so, it shone in the twinkling lights that surrounded her.

The last firecracker sizzled and died, and with only the flickering torches to light her, the woman bowed to the assembled men. ‘I need,’ she said in a husky, seductive French accent. ‘A man.’

 The howls and catcalls would have overwhelmed anyone without a strong determination. She waited; arms folded and with an amused look on her face until there was once more silence. Then she raised one eyebrow. Even at the distance he was, Gibb realised the woman was toying with them. Teasing them about something they thought would happen and she knew would not.

To his annoyance, his body tightened even more. He did not want this reaction to an unknown woman. Hell, he didn’t want it to one known to him either. Gibb Alford wanted no one to disturb his well-ordered life. The life where his mind never let him shy away from the one thing that tore into him. His wife was dead and he was to blame. He was never going to be put in a similar position again.

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Happy Reading,

love Raven x