Goddess Fish
Promotions is organizing a Virtual Super Book Blast Tour for The Maid of Milan by Beverley Eikli, a Historical Regency Romance available in
eBook 2/15/14 and print 3/15/14 from Choc Lit Publishing.
Beverly will award a $20 Amazon book voucher and a digital copy of The
Reluctant Bride to a randomly drawn commenter during the tour.
Blurb
After
three years of marriage, Adelaide has fallen in love with the handsome,
honourable husband who nurtured her through her darkest hours.
Now
Adelaide’s former lover, the passionate poet from whose arms she was torn by
her family during their illicit liaison in Milan six years previously has
returned, a celebrity due to the success of his book The Maid of Milan.
High
society is as desperate to discover the identity of his ‘muse’ as Adelaide is
to protect her newfound love and her husband’s political career.
Excerpt
Chapter One
It was not the name by
which she knew him. Since inheriting the title, he’d won celebrity as a poet
and become the darling of the gossip columnists. Adelaide’s mother couldn’t
keep those snippets of the real world from her, though she tried.
James. Fifth Viscount
Dewhurst. Adelaide closed her eyes against the afternoon sun and tried to block
her last memory of him: desperate, pleading. Not the James she knew – the
irrepressible charmer who knew no woman could resist him, least of all
Adelaide.
Tristan must have
misinterpreted her shocked silence for memory failure, for he squeezed her hand
and repeated, ‘Lord Dewhurst. I’m
talking about my old friend, James.’ Very gently he added, ‘He and his wife
were very good to you, if you remember.’
If you remember…
Her husband’s
reference to her previous life was almost more painful than the reference to
James, though panic quickly succeeded shock at his next remark.
‘James is coming to
visit us? Here?’ She gripped Tristan’s arm tighter and concentrated on the
path. One foot in front of the other, head down so she didn’t stumble on the
stones that bordered the hydrangeas from the neat gravel walkway.
Tristan continued to
talk in the measured, comforting tone he used when her equilibrium was
unsettled. In the past he’d sought her reassurances that she was comfortable
with his plans; that there was nothing he’d neglected to facilitate her
comfort. Always Tristan put Adelaide’s feelings first. Not today.
Tristan was too
excited at the prospect of seeing his boyhood friend to recognise her horror,
assuming Adelaide would be delighted to play hostess since she’d foolishly
voiced the desire just last week to entertain more often.
She remained silent as
she walked at his side, contemplating her own strategy if this visit was a fait
accompli. She just needed to know when, so she could prepare.
‘At the end of the
week!’ She repeated Tristan’s calmly delivered answer to her question in the
tone Black Jack, the South American parrot she’d owned in Vienna, used to mimic
the death throes of a man at the end of the gallows. A good thing her husband
considered Adelaide an invalid, that he’d misconstrue the flare in her eyes,
the gasp as she pressed against the pain in her side – her heart?
‘Adelaide, you are
discomposed. Perhaps I should not have invited James without consulting you,
but I thought since…’ Concern clouded his kind blue eyes as he trailed off.
‘He was very good to
me.’ She whispered the old litany. It’s what Tristan liked to believe.
‘He was. Shall we go
back to the house?’ He stooped to cup her face in his hands, as tender with her
as if she were another of his rare hothouse blooms. As if she might wilt at the
suggestion of anything beyond the ordinary, the mindnumbingly mundane.
And yet today she more
than wilted as she stumbled on the smooth, carefully raked gravel path. Her
heart was in danger of tearing in half. James. Here, at Deer Park …?
She pushed away the
fear, straightening of her own accord. Adelaide could be a good deal stronger
than Tristan believed her. Than her mother painted her.
‘So silly of me,’ she
murmured, smiling as she tucked her hand once more into the crook of her
husband’s arm, firming her step, indicating with a nod that they continue their
usual
morning walk. Minutely
managed and predictable. Around the path that bordered the maze, over the
little bridge and across the lawn, skirting the deer park beyond the iron gated
border to the dower house where her mother would be waiting. Keeping up the
pretence of recovery in response to his
troubled gaze, she added, ‘Really, I’m perfectly fine.’ How many times had she
made similar reassurances?
Of course, she hadn’t
been fine when Tristan had made her mistress of Deer Park three years before; a
marriage offer she’d only accepted because she believed she’d be dead of grief
within the twelvemonth. And if not dead, then at least free of her mother.
Neither had happened.
‘So James has left
Milan.’ She forced herself to say his name. It came out as a faint thread of
sound. James. He needed to stay far across sea and land if she were to have any
peace in this life.
‘James’s father died
three months ago so of course he must return from the Continent and take up his
responsibilities at Dingley Hall.’ Tristan stopped and put his hands on her
shoulders to study her more closely. ‘Darling, you’re very pale. Perhaps we
should call Dr Stanhope—’
‘No!’ She truncated
the hysteria in her response, adding with commendable calm, ‘Please, let us
carry on.’
Tristan was clearly
not convinced by her assurances, but he returned to his commentary as they
walked sedately through Deer Park’s beautiful gardens. ‘James’s standing has
changed with his father’s death, and now that his book has become a sensation
so have his fortunes. He’ll be able to
put to rights all that his father almost destroyed through his love of gaming.’
He gave a half laugh. ‘I’m told my old friend is nearly as famous as those
fellows up in the Lakes. I daresay I should read The Maid of Milan before he
arrives. Perhaps you’d enjoy it, Addy.’
The Maid of Milan.
Dear God! An image of herself and James, naked limbs entwined upon a vast
expanse of white linen tablecloth in the Villa Cosi after the guests had
gone, seared her brain.
No, she was getting
beyond herself. James had continued living in Milan with Hortense, the wife he
despised. Of course there’d have been other women after Adelaide had been
dragged, screaming, from James’s arms. Adelaide could not be James’s Maid of
Milan. Not after the terrible finale to their affair. In three years Adelaide
had heard nothing from him. Nothing, except that one terrible, terrible letter
…
Author bio and links
Beverley Eikli is the author of eight historical
romances. In 2012 she won UK Women's Fiction publisher Choc-Lit's Search for An
Australia Star competition with her suspenseful, Napoleonic espionage Romance
The Reluctant Bride, which has just been shortlisted by Australian Romance
Readers for Favourite Historical in 2013.
In 2011 she was nominated for an ARRA award for her
Regency romance A Little Deception, and in 2012 for her racy Regency Romp,
Rake’s Honour, written under her Beverley Oakley pseudonym.
Eikli wrote her first romance when she was seventeen.
However, drowning the heroine on the last page was, she discovered, not in the
spirit of the genre so her romance-writing career ground to a halt and she
became a journalist.
After throwing in her job on South Australia's
metropolitan daily The Advertiser to manage a luxury safari lodge in the
Okavango Delta, in Botswana, she discovered a new world of romance and
adventure in a thatched cottage in the middle of a mopane forest with the
handsome Norwegian bush pilot she met around a camp fire.
Twenty years later, after exploring the world in the
back of Cessna 404s and CASA 212s as an airborne geophysical survey operator
during low-level sorties over the French Guyanese jungle and Greenland's ice
cap, Eikli is back in Australia teaching in the Department of Professional
Writing & Editing at Victoria University, as well as teaching Short Courses
for the Centre of Adult Education and Macedon Ranges Further Education.
Preorder The Maid of Milan at The Book Depository: http://www.bookdepository.com/Maid-Milan-Beverley-Eikli/9781781891285
I thoroughly enjoyed reading chapter 1. Will you release any more chapter excerpts... because I'm in love with this story already!
ReplyDeleteilookfamous(at)yahoo(dot)com
Thanks so much for hosting, and giving me the opportunity to ask which women in history readers find inspiring.
ReplyDeleteWhile you being Down Under and I here in good old Europe, we did not meet. Nevertheless it was a pleasure having you here, Beverley. Btw, I like strong women - whether in history or in the present.
DeleteSo what role do titles play in this one Beverly? Did you have to do a lot of research for the viscount, duke, and earl stuff??
ReplyDeleteandralynn7 AT gmail DOT com