The Maid of Milan
by Beverly
Eikli
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
BLURB:
After
three years of marriage, Adelaide has fallen in love with the handsome,
honourable husband who nurtured her through her darkest hours.
Now
Adelaide’s former lover, the passionate poet from whose arms she was torn by
her family during their illicit liaison in Milan six years previously has
returned, a celebrity due to the success of his book The Maid of Milan.
High
society is as desperate to discover the identity of his ‘muse’ as Adelaide is
to protect her newfound love and her husband’s political career.
EXCERPT:
Chapter One
It was not
the name by which she knew him. Since inheriting the title, he’d won celebrity
as a poet and become the darling of the gossip columnists. Adelaide’s mother
couldn’t keep those snippets of the real world from her, though she tried.
James. Fifth
Viscount Dewhurst. Adelaide closed her eyes against the afternoon sun and tried
to block her last memory of him: desperate, pleading. Not the James she knew –
the irrepressible charmer who knew no woman could resist him, least of all
Adelaide.
Tristan must
have misinterpreted her shocked silence for memory failure, for he squeezed her
hand and repeated, ‘Lord Dewhurst. I’m
talking about my old friend, James.’ Very gently he added, ‘He and his wife
were very good to you, if you remember.’
If you
remember…
Her husband’s
reference to her previous life was almost more painful than the reference to
James, though panic quickly succeeded shock at his next remark.
‘James is
coming to visit us? Here?’ She gripped Tristan’s arm tighter and concentrated
on the path. One foot in front of the other, head down so she didn’t stumble on
the stones that bordered the hydrangeas from the neat gravel walkway.
Tristan
continued to talk in the measured, comforting tone he used when her equilibrium
was unsettled. In the past he’d sought her reassurances that she was
comfortable with his plans; that there was nothing he’d neglected to facilitate
her comfort. Always Tristan put Adelaide’s feelings first. Not today.
Tristan was
too excited at the prospect of seeing his boyhood friend to recognise her
horror, assuming Adelaide would be delighted to play hostess since she’d
foolishly voiced the desire just last week to entertain more often.
She remained
silent as she walked at his side, contemplating her own strategy if this visit
was a fait accompli. She just needed to know when, so she could prepare.
‘At the end
of the week!’ She repeated Tristan’s calmly delivered answer to her question in
the tone Black Jack, the South American parrot she’d owned in Vienna, used to mimic
the death throes of a man at the end of the gallows. A good thing her husband
considered Adelaide an invalid, that he’d misconstrue the flare in her eyes,
the gasp as she pressed against the pain in her side – her heart?
‘Adelaide,
you are discomposed. Perhaps I should not have invited James without consulting
you, but I thought since…’ Concern clouded his kind blue eyes as he trailed off.
‘He was very
good to me.’ She whispered the old litany. It’s what Tristan liked to believe.
‘He was.
Shall we go back to the house?’ He stooped to cup her face in his hands, as
tender with her as if she were another of his rare hothouse blooms. As if she
might wilt at the suggestion of anything beyond the ordinary, the mindnumbingly
mundane.
And yet today
she more than wilted as she stumbled on the smooth, carefully raked gravel
path. Her heart was in danger of tearing in half. James. Here, at Deer Park …?
She pushed
away the fear, straightening of her own accord. Adelaide could be a good deal
stronger than Tristan believed her. Than her mother painted her.
‘So silly of
me,’ she murmured, smiling as she tucked her hand once more into the crook of
her husband’s arm, firming her step, indicating with a nod that they continue
their usual
morning walk.
Minutely managed and predictable. Around the path that bordered the maze, over
the little bridge and across the lawn, skirting the deer park beyond the iron gated
border to the dower house where her mother would be waiting. Keeping up the
pretence of recovery in response to his
troubled gaze, she added, ‘Really, I’m perfectly fine.’ How many times had she
made similar reassurances?
Of course,
she hadn’t been fine when Tristan had made her mistress of Deer Park three
years before; a marriage offer she’d only accepted because she believed she’d
be dead of grief within the twelvemonth. And if not dead, then at least free of
her mother. Neither had happened.
‘So James has
left Milan.’ She forced herself to say his name. It came out as a faint thread
of sound. James. He needed to stay far across sea and land if she were to have
any peace in this life.
‘James’s
father died three months ago so of course he must return from the Continent and
take up his responsibilities at Dingley Hall.’ Tristan stopped and put his
hands on her shoulders to study her more closely. ‘Darling, you’re very pale.
Perhaps we should call Dr Stanhope—’
‘No!’ She
truncated the hysteria in her response, adding with commendable calm, ‘Please,
let us carry on.’
Tristan was
clearly not convinced by her assurances, but he returned to his commentary as
they walked sedately through Deer Park’s beautiful gardens. ‘James’s standing has
changed with his father’s death, and now that his book has become a sensation
so have his fortunes. He’ll be able to
put to rights all that his father almost destroyed through his love of gaming.’
He gave a half laugh. ‘I’m told my old friend is nearly as famous as those
fellows up in the Lakes. I daresay I should read The Maid of Milan before he
arrives. Perhaps you’d enjoy it, Addy.’
The Maid of
Milan. Dear God! An image of herself and James, naked limbs entwined upon a vast
expanse of white linen tablecloth in the Villa Cosi after the guests had gone, seared her brain.
No, she was
getting beyond herself. James had continued living in Milan with Hortense, the
wife he despised. Of course there’d have been other women after Adelaide had been
dragged, screaming, from James’s arms. Adelaide could not be James’s Maid of
Milan. Not after the terrible finale to their affair. In three years Adelaide
had heard nothing from him. Nothing, except that one terrible, terrible letter
…
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
Beverley
Eikli is the author of eight historical romances. In 2012 she won UK Women's
Fiction publisher Choc-Lit's Search for An Australia Star competition with her
suspenseful, Napoleonic espionage Romance The Reluctant Bride, which has just
been shortlisted by Australian Romance Readers for Favourite Historical in
2013.
In
2011 she was nominated for an ARRA award for her Regency romance A Little
Deception, and in 2012 for her racy Regency Romp, Rake’s Honour, written under
her Beverley Oakley pseudonym.
Eikli
wrote her first romance when she was seventeen. However, drowning the heroine
on the last page was, she discovered, not in the spirit of the genre so her
romance-writing career ground to a halt and she became a journalist.
After
throwing in her job on South Australia's metropolitan daily The Advertiser to
manage a luxury safari lodge in the Okavango Delta, in Botswana, she discovered
a new world of romance and adventure in a thatched cottage in the middle of a
mopane forest with the handsome Norwegian bush pilot she met around a camp
fire.
Twenty
years later, after exploring the world in the back of Cessna 404s and CASA 212s
as an airborne geophysical survey operator during low-level sorties over the
French Guyanese jungle and Greenland's ice cap, Eikli is back in Australia
teaching in the Department of Professional Writing & Editing at Victoria
University, as well as teaching Short Courses for the Centre of Adult Education
and Macedon Ranges Further Education.
Preorder
The Maid of Milan at The Book Depository:
http://www.bookdepository.com/Maid-Milan-Beverley-Eikli/9781781891285
Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Maid-Milan-Beverley-Eikli/dp/1781891281/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381039713&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Maid+of+Milan
Website:
http://www.beverleyeikli.com/
Blog:
http://beverleyeikli.blogspot.com.au/
Twitter:
http://beverleyoakley/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beverley.eikli
