One Night With A Rake
Respectable young widows do not wake up with strange men in their beds…
Finding oneself in bed with a complete stranger who has lost his memory is not the way for a respectable widow to maintain her reputation. But Amanda feels obliged to help the mysterious Jay, even if her heart is broken in the process.
The deeper they venture into the mystery of his true identify the more Amanda knows she is in danger – although she could never have imagined just how real that peril would prove to be.
This is an extensively revised version of the original novel of the same title which was published in 2003.
Excerpt
Mrs Clare floated gently up into a delicious state of half-sleep, half waking, and hovered there for a few moments, comfortably aware that there was no light from the window on her closed lids and that therefore there was no need to wake and get up from the deep and enveloping feather mattress. She snuggled down warmly and drifted back into slumber, lulled by the reassuring sound of deep, regular, male breathing from the other side of the bed.
Perhaps an hour later the sounds of the household intruded into her dreams without waking her. Faint riddling noises rose from grates were being readied for the day’s fires, a cockerel crowed in the yard and a door downstairs banged. Mrs Clare frowned in her sleep, turned over and burrowed into the pillow. It seemed that the other sleeper had turned too, for her hand touched warm linen and her body sank into the central dip of the bed, to touch his lightly.
Her dream turned from a pleasant scene in a draper’s shop where multi-coloured piles of silks and taffetas heaped from floor to ceiling, every one of them so dagger-cheap that it would be a sin not to buy them all, to a confused image of herself, tangled both in the silks and in the arms of a man whose face she could not see. She struggled, but half-heartedly, for his hands were caressing her body and his mouth…
