My Regency Christmas novella has pre-released! For one day only you can read if for free, part of a steamy romance Christmas anthology.
Check out an excerpt below!
You can download A Wicked Winter Gift today (It is free only today!)
A WICKED WINTER GIFT by R.R. Vane
ENGLAND, 1817, THE 5TH OF DECEMBER
Beatrice supposed she’d always been a bluestocking. When other little girls played with ribbons and dolls, she’d already learnt to read in two languages apart from her own.
And at the age when most young ladies of Quality would think of nothing other than their first Season, Beatrice had already translated Virgil’s Aeneid in its entirety and contemplated translating Catullus. Only, her father had sternly told her, Catullus was not even a suitable reading for a lady of her class, let alone a suitable translation. That had not thwarted Beatrice in the least. She had ended up translating Catullus in secret.
She was an only child, but she had several cousins, two of whom currently resided in the same house as she did, since their common grandmother, Lady Renfield, had taken it upon herself to oversee the education of all her three granddaughters.
And upon this Christmas, some of their family was to reunite under Lady Renfield’s roof – Beatrice’s father, as well as her aunt and uncle, had already arrived from London, and even her eldest cousin Freddie would soon get here at last after a year spent traveling through Europe with a person that Lady Renfield called “his depraved friend”.
It was on the subject of this depraved friend that Lady Renfield was now ranting and raving.
“Oh, how insensitive of Freddie to bring that vile man in this house for Christmastide! A full month spent with three unmarried, innocent young ladies!”
The three unmarried ladies in question were Althea and Penelope, who were Beatrice’s cousins, and certainly, Beatrice herself.
“You could, after all, instruct Freddie to uninvite his friend, if you don’t want him here,” Beatrice ventured, which earned her dark looks from both her grandmother and her cousins.
Beatrice shrugged to herself, returning upon the book she was perusing because she had long become accustomed to such dark looks. Her grandmother had given up upon her, proclaiming her unmarriageable at the venerable age of four and twenty. And her two cousins hated her – why precisely, Beatrice had never been able to fathom. Suffice it to say they hated her. To them, she was either “Bluestocking Beatrice” or “Beatrice the Beast”.
“For sure she cannot uninvite him, you ninny. He is an earl,” Althea enlightened her (… )
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