A Long Winter’s Night
A Farce Before Christmas Regency Romance
What Anthea Marsh wants, when she attends a Christmas house party at The Willows, is a reprieve from years of near constant mourning. She also needs to escape the incessant, insistent marriage proposals from her dead father’s heir.
What Gerrard Lowell, Earl of Elmsall, wants when he attends the same house party, is to look about for an eligible lady to be his wife and mother to his lonely young son.
But theirs is a mismatch made for a Christmas farce. Gerrard is the man who betrayed Anthea’s love years before by marrying her best friend. Worse, Gerrard cannot look at Anthea without remembering his most reckless youthful misadventure.
Nonetheless, there are forces at work to push the two together. And to pull them apart. Fools, duels and The Polite World’s Rules. Which will win?
In madcap pursuit, through a long winter’s night, from drawing room to bed chamber, Anthea and Gerrard chase their dreams, hoping to catch the love that eluded them so long ago.
When Beatrice Keating walks away from a house party on Christmas Eve, she only wants a breath of fresh air. She has been thoroughly humiliated by her fellow guests at The Willows and by her own mother. But a short walk turns into a trek through a blizzard.
Kit Payne, the scholarly Marquess of Monkwood, is abroad in the same snowstorm. He too is avoiding his dragon of a mother and her candidates for his future bride.
Kit rescues Beatrice from a life threatening situation but she is immediately wary of him. However, what begins as a case of mistaken identities quickly turns into an alliance. Beatrice and Kit discover they have two things in common: parents who stand in the way of their ambitions and an abiding love of Shakespeare. But is that enough to save them both?
Will Beatrice pry Kit from the dragon’s claws? Will Kit free Beatrice from a life in servitude to her Mama’s whims? “Oh! That one might read the book of fate . . .”
With The Bard as their lodestar, two beleaguered souls chase their futures through a stormy Christmas Eve night to reach the treasure of their own hopes and dreams fulfilled.