Where I've taken you back 200 years to meet Ben and Clarissa...
in...
Welcome to #MidWeekTease
To have and to hold?
Reluctant
debutante Lady Clarissa Macpherson has never forgotten the forbidden kiss she
shared with notorious rake, Lord Theodore ‘Ben’ Bennett, all those years ago.
Even now, he’s the one man who sets Clarissa’s pulse racing and her skin
tingling – no matter how hard she tries to ignore it!
Yet,
when Ben rescues her from the unwanted advances of a drunken Lord at a society
ball, she finds herself in a most scandalous predicament – engaged, to the most
eligible bachelor in London!
Wedded?
It appears so, but bedded? Clarissa demands more from her marriage than simply
surrendering to her new husband’s sexual desires, especially when she realises
she’s falling deeper in love with him every single day. Ben must prove that
she’s the only woman for him – and surrender his heart!
Yet resisting her new husband’s delicious
seduction may prove the hardest thing Clarissa has ever done…
Lord
Theodore Bennett, known to his friends as Ben, and to his enemies – of whom
there were several – as that bloody Bennett, rolled over in bed, and opened one
brandy-bleary eye. No doubt if a mirror were handy, the eye would be as blood
red as the wine he thought followed the brandy. Or was that before? Ben was
more than a little hazy with regard to the previous night’s activities. The
last he remembered was accepting a wager that he couldn’t empty the overlarge
glass put in front of him, in one go. Had he? He had no idea, but it was a
certainty someone would let him know if he owed them money.
Ben
sighed, winced as the noise set off a blacksmith’s hammer in his head,
stretched, and froze. Why was a bolster down the middle of his bed? A soft
squidgy flesh-covered bolster? He patted it cautiously and it moved. He dropped
his hand as if it were scalded, and tried to bring his thoughts into some form
of order. It wasn’t easy.
A
woman? He never spent the night with a woman. Never, ever. Bed them and leave
them had always been his motto. And not in his own bed. That was a given.
Everyone knew and accepted that. Didn’t
they?
Somewhere
in the back of his fragmented mind he remembered music and damned doves flying
overhead. Doves, for fuck’s sake, and he didn’t even get a chance to take a pot
shot at them. Had he been to Vauxhall to watch one of the many spectacles
there? No, the music had been ‘churchy’, and … Oh my lord. A wife. I have a wife. The events of the previous day
came back to him with immediate and hideous clarity. This needed to be
discussed further. He reached out to the softness next to him and squeezed.
The
bolster stirred and muttered something. Even in his less than awake state it
didn’t sound complimentary. He pulled his hand back again. Soft fingers fumbled
over his body, and fastened on his morning erection.
The
screech sent sharp daggers of pain splintering through his head. Nails dug into
his skin, and that hammer hit his skull with monotonous regularity.
‘For
goodness’ sake, woman’ – he hoped to hell it was a woman – he didn’t think he’d suddenly discovered a propensity
for his own sex – ‘there is no need to awaken every dog and monkey for streets
around. Have you never felt a …?’ He paused. What polite way was there of
informing your wife – or who he assumed must be his wife, for surely he was not
debauched enough to take another woman to bed on his wedding night – how your
body woke up every morning? Even, it seemed, after an excess of wine and
brandy. ‘A man’s body like this? If not, get used to it.’
The Scandalous Proposal of Lord Bennett
is available from Amazon here
and
and
the other #MidWeekTease posts are here
This and all my books can be found on my website
Happy reading,
love, Raven x
