Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Beverley Oakley: The Accidental Elopement #NewRelease



The Accidental Elopement Scandalous Miss Brightwell Series (Book 4) By Beverley Oakley

Beverley is giving away a $10 Amazon Gift Certificate to on lucky winner. Please use the Rafflecopter below to enter. Remember you may increase your chances of winning by visiting the other stops on the tour. You may find those locations here

About the Book: A seven-year secret. A tragic misunderstanding. Can love outwit fate in this twisted tale of misadventure and thwarted dreams?

Earl Quamby’s niece, Katherine, and Jack, a foundling home lad adopted by a local family, have been loyal friends for as long as they can remember. As Jack is about to leave England to make his fortune and Katherine is being courted by two eligible suitors, they unexpectedly realise their friendship has blossomed into passionate love. A love, they are warned, that has no future. Despite a brave attempt to defy the forces keeping them apart, tragedy results and the pair is separated. When chance throws them together seven years later, Katherine, newly widowed, is being pressured into a marriage not of her choosing to avoid scandal and Jack feels he must honour his pledge to the worthy Odette whom he met in India and whose father is dying. Katherine knows that revealing a long-held secret may win Jack to her but she also knows conflicting obligations from past and present may tear him apart. Can master matchmakers, Fanny, Antoinette and Bertram Brightwell, outwit fate in its latest attempt to keep these star-crossed lovers apart and deliver them the happiness they deserve? This is Book 4 in the Scandalous Miss Brightwell series but it can be read as a stand-alone. Amazon Buy Link



Order The Accidental Elopement now for the special price of $2.99 and you'll get an ecopy of Scandalous: Three Daring Charades in the Pursuit of Love. Just send a screen shot of proof of purchase to beverley (at) eikli.com and she'll send you the link for your free book.  Amazon Buy Link


Excerpt:  In this excerpt, Katherine is hiding in a dark corridor to avoid dancing with someone she has no wish to see during her first ball as a newly arrived London debutante. She then receives a rude shock!

No one had thought to light a candle sconce and this second corridor turning she’d taken was as black as a dungeon. Katherine couldn’t even see her hand but she wasn’t frightened of the dark.

No, Katherine was not fainthearted.

Yet she did squeal when, taking another step, her progress was impeded by a very large object and, with no warning at all, she found herself flying through the air, landing with a painful jarring of her wrists upon the cold, hard flagstones.

“Good Lord!” came a disembodied young male voice in the dark before a groping hand located a piece of Katherine – namely a hank of hair – which caused her to shriek even louder when it was quite unnecessarily tugged. Whether this was to establish who or what she was, she had no idea – and perhaps neither did the tugger for immediately a profound apology was issued before the groping hand was operating with complete abandon in the dark.

This time it found Katherine’s breast just as the voice said in tones of utter mortification, “Forgive me! Are you hurt? Here, let me help you. That’s what I was trying to do, I promise. I didn’t realise you were on the ground? Take my hand. Really, I can’t apologise enough.”

Katherine had made one unsuccessful attempt to stand but it was a struggle in her flounced skirt and multiple corded petticoats. She swatted away the supposedly helping hand and hissed something unintelligible – somehow unladylike language seemed less of an offence when she couldn’t see to whom she was speaking.

But when the disembodied groping hand entered her orbit once more – in fact, brushing the bare flash above her garter and getting in a good squeeze of her thigh flesh, her temper which had never been one of her strong points, snapped and she lashed out with a sharp slice through the inky air.

A loud yelp made her realise she’d perhaps been a little peremptory and certainly too violent in this unladylike action and even though she felt disinclined to apologise she did say, ungraciously, “I’m sorry I hit you but a lady can only take so much of all this groping in the dark. I mean…what were you doing?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” came the response, now at ear level. In fact, she could feel the soft whisper of breath against her cheek which made her step back, saying, “I asked first.”

“I was chasing a cat. Bending down in fact. And then something crashed into me. Or on top of me.”

“That was me.”

“Yes, of course it was you. There’s no one else here, is there?”

Katherine bridled at his tone. She was unused to being spoken to as if she were at fault when, in this case, she most certainly wasn’t. “I think that’s a very rude response,” she told him. “Just as it was very thoughtless of you to crouch down where anybody could simply trip over you.”

“Anybody – or rather, anybody else – would be carrying a candle. I think I have every reason to be deeply suspicious of the motives of anyone who is not.”

“Well, you don’t have a candle. And I would suspect the truth of anyone hiding away in the dark, claiming they were crouching over an imaginary cat,” huffed Katherine. “In fact, I’d wager there was no cat here at all. I would have heard it. No, you were sneaking away from something, weren’t you?”

“And if I was, what business of yours? Whoever you are.”

Katherine could not imagine the audacity. “You certainly are no gentleman to speak to a lady in that fashion.”

“Since that lady hasn’t bothered to declare herself, I think I could be forgiven.”

“A gentleman would have declared himself first,” Katherine said hotly. “What were you sidling away from? There’s a noisy ball going on in the next room. If you were a gentleman, wouldn’t you be gallantly asking the ladies to dance instead of hiding in the dark? Perhaps there’s someone you’re afraid of seeing? A lady who has expectations of you behaving towards her as a gentleman.” Katherine said this triumphantly before elaborating on her theme. “My guess is that you’ve given some poor young lady the idea that you’ll dance with her all night and now you’ve changed your mind and are sneaking away.”

“Since you put forward the idea, I’d suggest the reason you’re here is exactly the same. You’re trying to sneak away from a gentleman to whom you’ve already promised two dances. Meanwhile he, poor fellow, is searching for you vainly in the ballroom while you’re here making a mockery of him.”

“He can do that all by himself,” Katherine sniffed. “But I never promised him anything and I never will.”

“Ha! I was right.” The voice sounded very pleased with itself. “Well, I feel sorry for this fellow without even seeing what you look like, miss. Poor fellow!”

“Poor fellow, indeed. George can pine til the cows come home. I’d even suffer talking to you than have to spend another five minutes with his sweating hands squeezing mine and his moon eyes boring into me…and his horrible, putrid breath choking me and his—”

“Poor George! I was just starting to feel sorry for him until you described the exact George I, too, am so at pains to avoid tonight.” The voice became more confidential and the mood relaxed. Katherine crossed her arms and waited for him to speak again for she was rather interested in his George and then quite amused when the voice began to describe the very George against whom she railed.

“Well, you have described my cousin to a very fine point,” she laughed. “And if you are as well acquainted with him as you seem to be, then you obviously know exactly why I am here in the dark.” There was a small silence. And then, “Your cousin?”

“In my family there are two Georges: Young George who is the son of my aunt and her husband, Lord Quamby, and Odious George who is his uncle, George Bramley.”

“Then we’re talking about the same George!” The voice sounded stunned. A quick gasp from both of them was followed up by a delighted cry in unison.

“Jack!”

“Katherine!”


Interview with author Beverley Oakley

Jana: Was there anything unusual, any anecdote about this book you’d like to share?

Beverley: I guess I was surprised to find that a major theme in this story was bullying. On the face of it, The Accidental Elopement is a traditional Regency and the previous book in the series has a number of reviews likening it to a Jane Austen style romance.

But when bullying and its long-term consequences dictated so many events in the story, I went back and strengthened key scenes.

To explain, when my hero and heroine are seven years old, they are bullied by the seven-year-old son of an earl. At this age, they’re smarter than he – and he realizes it. So he uses his money and power, 10 years later and then another seven years after that, to get his revenge. Yet his greatest desire throughout has been to gain the love and acceptance of his young playmates.

Hand in hand with the bullying theme is redemption, so I found a nice ending to tie in the two. It wasn’t what I’d expected to write.

Jana: Do you have any unusual writing habits?

Beverley: I can’t work without a deadline. When I wrote for traditional publishers, deadlines were part of my contract. Now, I have to set my own deadline. It’s why I was up at 4.30am today to finish the formatting of a book that needed to be uploaded by 11am today – or I’d be locked out of doing pre-orders with Amazon for a year and lose all the revenue from the pre-orders already in the system. That’s a pretty good incentive if you’re a writer who depends on writing income to pay the bills. 

Jana: What do you want readers to come away with after they read The Accidental Elopement?

Beverley: I’d like the reviews to be in line with the reviews I had for the previous book, Devil’s Run: that it “brings out the quirkiness of country gentry and difficulties facing women of the times” or is a “very intriguing Austen-esque novel with well developed characters and story line.”

This Scandalous Miss Brightwell series is what I call my “Jane Austen meets Fanny Hill” series. Only the first in the series – Rake’s Honour - bears any resemblance to author John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, though. That’s because when I start writing a heroine, she takes control and I can’t help her character. Rake’s Honour details the adventures of a young lady who is a major risk-taker and very naughty. The second – Rogue’s Kiss – had a very proper heroine with many reviewers likening it to a roller-coaster “French Farce” when everything that could go wrong, does. The last two books, Devil’s Run and The Accidental Elopement are slightly more serious in tone.

I’m going to put them into a box set to appeal to readers who like to read very different types of stories one after the other.

Jana: What genre have you never written that you’d like to write?

Beverley: I’m about to publish my first Africa-set romantic suspense. Diamond Mountain is in final edits and it features a bush pilot hero in the African mountain kingdom of Lesotho in the early 1960s caught up in an illegal diamond buying scheme as he battles to save the honour of the beautiful district commissioner’s daughter. (My father was a District Commissioner in Lesotho in the early 1960s who prosecuted illegal diamond buying (IDB) and I married a handsome Norwegian bush pilot I met in Botswana before we moved to Australia so I have the research pretty much in hand, despite the fact it’s a new genre.)

Jana: Do you work on more than one book at a time?

Beverley: Usually, yes. Sometimes I’ll write 1000 words each of two different books to “further” them towards the end, but then I might have to concentrate on the final edits of one to get it ready to publish.

Jana: Do you have any words of advice to beginning writers?

Beverley: Never give up because you never know if success is around the next corner.

Jana: Tell us a bit about you. Where do you live, and how long have you been writing?

Beverley: I live in a country town north of Melbourne, Australia opposite a huge Gothic insane asylum and I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember.

Jana: If writing is your first passion, what is your second?

Beverley: My husband.

Jana: How do you think your life experiences have prepared you for writing?

Beverley: After I met my husband in Botswana, we lived in 12 countries so romance writing was an important outlet for me.

Jana: Do you have any pets? 

Beverley: I have a gorgeous Rhodesian Ridgeback called Mombo named after the luxury safari lodge in the Okavango, Botswana, which I was managing when I met my husband.

Jana: What genre is your favorite to read?

Beverley: I read romance, thriller, mystery, literary, historical, memoir, time travel and biography, amongst other genres. I’m not so into science fiction or fantasy.

Jana: What do you like best about your hero in The Accidental Elopement?

Beverley: Jack believes he’s an orphan and he’s been brought up in the foundling home and workhouse until he was adopted by a wealthy family at seven but I love his code of honour. He’ll sacrifice anything to achieve what he believes is right. He’s also passionate, determined and kind.

Jana: What do you like best about your heroine in The Accidental Elopement?

Beverley: Katherine was a naughty child who is on the cusp of great possibilities when she makes a very terrible miscalculation. For seven years she suffers until her hero returns. What I like about her is that she’s learned a lot of life lessons and now, she, too, is driven to do what’s right and honourable, even if it means sacrificing her own happiness.

Jana: How can readers reach you or find you online?

Beverley: www.beverleyoakley.com and @BeverleyOakley
https://www.facebook.com/AuthorBeverleyOakley/

Jana: What’s your tagline? Why did you choose it?

Beverley: Regency romance with scandal, mystery and intrigue. I chose it because some of my stories have all of those things, and some have only one.

Jana: If I was a first time reader of your books, which one would you recommend I start with and why?


Beverley: I’d start with Devil’s Run, the book prior to this. Then readers can decide if they want to jump back one book for French farce and a bit of humour in Rogue’s Kiss, or two back – Rake’s Honour - for sizzling sauciness. Or go a bit more poignant with a good dose of humour and read The Accidental Elopement.

Other Books In The Series:

 

Rake's Honour (Book 1)  Beautiful, impoverished Fanny Brightwell has a few scores to settle—and a heart to win—before she can secure the wealthy, aristocratic husband her ambitious mama demands. Pick up a free copy here!



Rogue's Kiss (Book 2) Would a potential suitor be bolder if he were told the lie that the maiden he desires has only six months to live? Amazon Buy Link



Devil's Run (Book 3) A rigged horse race - with a marriage and a lost child riding on the outcome. Amazon Buy Link

~*~*~*~*~ About the Author: 

Beverley Oakley was seventeen when she bundled up her first her 500+ page romance and sent it to a publisher. Unfortunately drowning her heroine on the last page was apparently not in line with the expectations of romance readers so Beverley became a journalist.

Twenty-six years later Beverley was delighted to receive her first publishing contract from Robert Hale (UK) for a romance in which she ensured her heroine was saved from drowning in the icy North Sea.

Since 2009 Beverley has written more than thirteen historical romances, mostly set in England during the early nineteenth century. Mystery, intrigue and adventure spill from their pages and if she can pull off a thrilling race to save someone’s honour – or a worthy damsel from the noose – it’s time to celebrate with a good single malt Scotch.

Beverley lives with her husband, two daughters and a Rhodesian Ridgeback puppy the size of a pony opposite a picturesque nineteenth-century lunatic asylum. She also writes Africa-set adventure-filled romances tarring handsome bush pilot heroes, and historical romances with less steam and more sexual tension, as Beverley Eikli.

You can get in contact with Beverley at:

website | Facebook | Pinterest | Twitter | Goodreads

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3 comments:

  1. I have not read any of her books...yet.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have not read any of her books, but am so excited to! These sound so good! She is a new author for me!

    ReplyDelete