On a Wild Night
Authors: STEPHANIE LAURENS
HarperCollins e-book extra:
From the Lab to the Regency: One Writer's Travels: An Interview with Stephanie Laurens
“It's hopeless!” Amanda Cynster flopped on her back on her twin sister's bed.
Exiting Mellors, Martin sauntered out into Duke Street.
If the minx was setting her cap at him, she was going about it in a damned unusual way.
Amanda slipped through the side gate of her parents' house into a narrow lane.
When she saw the dark figure atop the pawing roan waiting under the tree the next morning, . . .
Two mornings later, Amanda tiptoed around her bedchamber, wriggling into her chemise and . . .
She'd snared her lion only to find him wounded. For the moment, he could return . . .
“I don't suppose,” Martin inquired acerbically, as his carriage turned into Park Lane, . . .
The house was silent and still; his arms full of Amanda's warmth, Martin didn't feel its chill.
Neither, she decided, as she slipped from the house at five o'clock the next morning.
The remainder of the ball passed in a blur; Amanda couldn't wait to get home and into bed.
At precisely midnight, Amanda slipped out onto the narrow balcony at the end of the . . .
“These arrived for you a few minutes ago, Miss Amanda.”
In the days and evenings that followed, Amanda increasingly felt like an antelope cut out from . . .
Martin stepped into His Grace of St. Ives' studyâevery self-protective instinct he possessed . . .
The arrival of three white orchids every morning had become a regular feature in her life.
“A swing!” Amanda stopped before a padded bench, two people wide, suspended from a . . .
Amanda's fingers clutched Martin's; his hand locked over hers.
They were still snuggled in the warmth of his mother's counterpane when Martin heard . . .
“Da's in the cottage out back, m'lord.” The blacksmith set aside his bellows; his demeanor . . .
After making arrangements to leave the next morning, they retired early to their beds.
Under orders from his prospective bride and mother-in-law, Martin called in Upper Brook . . .
The sound jangled through the house, jangled over their nerves.
Â
Click on a name listed below to expand their branch of the family tree.
Â
One Writer's Travels
Part One
Â
An interview by
Claire E. White
Â
Australia's Stephanie Laurens was born on the island known to the ancients as Serendip, or Paradise (and today known as the less-than-paradisal Sri Lanka) and spent four formative years ('78-'81) living in England, in the Kentish countryside. Her residence there was a sixteenth-century oast house, right next door to a first-century Roman villa and just down the lane from a castle begun in the fourteenth century and completed in the seventeenth. Stephanie's time in England gave her firsthand experience of the scenery, the grand houses, and the English weather that would contribute to the richness of her historical romances, all set in the English Regency â that period, 1811-1820, during which George, Prince of Wales (later King George IV), served as regent for his mentally ill father, King George III.