Welcome Etta Stark!

I'm so happy Etta Stark is visiting with me today. As I told it, it may just class up the place. Etta is here to tell us about her third book. I'll turn it over to Etta...

Hello PK! Thanks very much for having me over to your reading room today in order to talk about my book, Lord Westbrook’s Muse. This is my third book and it’s a love story set in Victorian England telling the story of a stuffy Lord of the Manor and a beautiful free-spirited social reformer called Cass.

After embarking on a fairly steamy and clandestine love affair, Lord Westbrook and Cass develop stronger feelings for each other than they expected to. But there are secrets and misunderstandings and the social restrictions of nineteenth century England. Believing they want different things, Cass ended the relationship between herself and Lord Westbrook. She then went on to drink far too much and behave badly at a party at Lord Westbrook’s house. This led to her being given a rather severe spanking with a riding crop by the furious Lord Westbrook. It’s now the following morning and he is having doubts about the thrashing he gave her.

Robert had just had the worst night’s sleep of his life. After Cass had gone home, he had spent the rest of the party in a disconnected fog.

She had looked so vulnerable lying across the table as he punished her. At least he had resisted the urge to take advantage of her in her prostrate state. It was bad enough that he had whipped her. Yet, he had wanted more than anything to caress her silky soft skin, to enter her and take pleasure in her inviting folds.

To have done such a thing would have made him an even bigger bastard than he already was. Cass had made it perfectly clear to him that his advances were no longer welcome when she had told him that their relationship was at an end.

Robert hadn’t been sorry to see the rest of his guests go home. He knew that his and Cass’s absence would be the subject of village gossip but he didn’t really care.

Whipping Cass had seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but he knew now that he had only done it because he was so angry with her. He had tried to convince himself that the anger was due to her drunken behaviour at the party but he knew that it wasn’t really. He was angry because she had rejected him. What kind of monster thrashes the living daylights out of a girl just because she no longer wants to sleep with him?

It wasn’t just the regret at his ungentlemanly conduct that had kept Robert awake all night. He had been trying to understand why he had felt so hurt and rejected that Cass had ended their affair. His offer to set her up in a house as his mistress had been presumptuous, he could see that now. But why did he feel so bereft? Why did he have such a jagged and painful sense of loss?

The answer eluded him for most of the night, and yet when it came to him, it was so obvious that he cursed himself his stupidity.

He loved her.

Lord Westbook’s Muse is Available from:

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Blushing Books

Barnes & Noble

Lord Robert Westbrook’s life of responsibility and social obligations is turned on its head when he meets Cass, a beautiful and idiosyncratic woman at his mother’s garden party. Cass is a staunch supporter of women’s rights as well as an advocate of dress reform, rejecting the restrictive fashions of the nineteenth century. 

In fact, Cass’s rebellion isn’t limited to her dress sense. She is also determined to experience the excitement and passion of a sexual liaison. Lord Westbrook, she has decided, is the very man she wants to seduce her. Meanwhile Lord Westbrook has determined that Cass requires some stern discipline. 

The couple’s passionate and fiery romance breaks every rule of Victorian decency and kindles a love that neither Cass nor Robert were prepared for. However, when Cass’s secret past finally catches up with her, it seems that the couple’s happiness might be doomed forever.