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:
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.
