Don’t you just love this cover? Thank you a million times over to Lankshear Design for another stunning winner!
The Demon Duke debuts June 6th, 2017 (not quite 6/6/6, but that’s because Damon Blackbourne, Duke of Malford, is not quite the demon everyone makes him out to be.
Here’s the blurb:
Behind every good man is a great secret.
Banished to Yorkshire as a boy for faults his father failed to beat out of him, Damon Blackbourne has no use for English society and had vowed never to return to his family’s estate at Thorne Hill, much less London. However, when his father and brother die in a freak carriage accident, it falls on Damon to take up the mantle of the Malford dukedom, and to introduce his sisters to London Society–his worst nightmare come to life.
He never planned on Lady Grace Mattersley. The beautiful debutante stirs him body and soul with her deep chocolate eyes and hesitant smiles. Until she stumbles across his dark secret.
Shy and bookish Grace much prefers solitude and reading to social just-about-anything. Her family may be pressuring her to take on the London Season to find herself a husband, but she has other ideas. Such as writing a novel of her own.
But she has no idea how to deal with the Duke of Malford.
Will she betray him to the world? Or will she be his saving Grace?
Colin Morgan as Merlin in the BBC’s The Adventures of Merlin.
In November of 2013, I was madly scribbling my way through a National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) draft of my second novel, A Matter of Time, anxious to hit that 50,000 word goal in the 30 days allotted. I was also high off my recent trip to London, in which I’d not only gotten to visit many famous Regency places I’d read about, but in which I also met and received a high-five from Colin Morgan, the British actor who played Merlin (brilliantly, I might add) on the BBC show of the same name.
I’d had, uh, more than a passing infatuation with the show and its two lead characters, Merlin and Prince Arthur, for nearly a year. I was neck-deep in a fandom, and loving every minute of it. I still do, and still hold great admiration for the acting talents, and yes, the visual appearance of Colin Morgan and Bradley James. So it only seemed fitting, as I typity-type-type-typed my way through chapter after chapter, that I add in characters that might bear more than a passing resemblance to those two fine men. I put them in as a lark, figuring it would amuse my best friend, who was reading what I wrote as fast as I sent it to her. I’d take them out later, surely.
Bradley James as Prince/King Arthur in the BBC’s The Adventures of Merlin.
But…but…instead of whittling the characters down, I expanded them. Made them the perfect foil for the occasionally-a-little-too-broody Deveric Mattersley. I gave them names: James Bradley, the Duke of Arthington, and Morgan Collinswood, the Marquess of Emerlin. I added in a few Merlin Easter eggs for anyone who’s seen the show. And I fell in love with them all over again.
They are minor characters, to be true, showing up only occasionally in A Matter of Time. But never fear – each will, at some point in the future, star as the hero in their own book. Because I love them too much to let them go. Here, just for the fun of it, is a small excerpt in which Eliza James meets the Duke and Marquess for the first time:
After a few moments, two gentlemen—one a tall, lanky fellow with a mop of black hair, the other a bit shorter and more muscular, with sandy blonde hair and a square jawline—approached.
“Lady Amara,” the blonde one said. He nodded toward Deveric’s sister, but his sky-blue eyes fixed on Eliza.
Wow, they really knew how to grow them in the Regency.
His exquisitely carved lips parted into a snaggle-toothed smile that somehow rendered him even more appealing; men with perfectly straight, obsessively white teeth always seemed unnatural to her.
She peeked at the taller one. He was perhaps not quite as classically handsome as the blonde, but his wide-set blue eyes crinkled as he greeted Amara, his lips cracking into a grin that revealed dimples to die for.
So – what do you think? Did I do them justice? And if you read A Matter of Time, I’d love to hear what you think – and what kind of women you feel the two men ought to end up with (sorry, Merthur fans – in my future novels, they’re getting the girl!).
Here’s a very brief blurb:
A modern-day Austenite’s dream comes true when she lands in the arms of a Regency duke, only to discover some fantasies aren’t all they’re cracked up to be when he proves less than a Prince Charming.
