It is an enormous pleasure to open my door to a dear friend, Beverley Eikli. Beverley is touring the cyber world with her latest historical romance, MAID OF MILAN. We have an excerpt from that book as well as the opportunity to go in the draw for a $20 Amazon gift card if you call past and leave a comment.
A little bit about Beverley...
A little bit about Beverley...
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.
Find out more about Beverley and her amazing life (and books) at her website, blog, Twitter and Facebook
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.
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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 …
DON'T FORGET TO LEAVE A COMMENT AND GO IN THE DRAW TO WIN A $20 AMAZON GIFT CARD.
DON'T FORGET TO LEAVE A COMMENT AND GO IN THE DRAW TO WIN A $20 AMAZON GIFT CARD.
