Lord Regret's Price: A Jane Austen Space Opera, Book 3 (34 page)

His restraint unraveled like the laces on a woman’s bodice. It slipped out from the eyelets and loosened the control on his guard.
 

Something moved in his waistcoat. Her hands. Her fingers. Sweet heaven, she sought to undress him!

The movement continued unabated, even as Ella shifted in his grasp. Through the thick fog of lust, Bennett fumbled in his pockets. At last he touched the vibrating metal.

“What is it?” she whispered near his ear.

He withdrew the pocket watch and shifted the lever to stop the alarm. He’d been here too long. He’d nearly forgotten his duty.

The haze lifted. Sanity returned. Bennett stepped away from Ella.

“What…where are you going?”

He smoothed a hand through his hair and tugged on his clothes. “I must go.”

“Now?” She stepped toward him. “Where? Why?”

Bennett looked again at her kiss-swollen lips then headed for the door. He’d let his guard down too long.

“Good night, Ella. I’m sorry I was not more help with the riddles.”

She ran after him. “Wait. What about the bargain?”

The bargain. She only kissed him for whatever ridiculous task she had, used her body to just satisfy his offer.

Lord, he still tasted her on his tongue, still breathed in her divine scent. Was it all a lie?

Bennett left the room. The cold, lonely darkness awaited him.

The only way to save her life is to resurrect the dead…

Darke London

© 2013 Coleen Kwan

Uncanny Chronicles, Book 1

Julian Darke was only a newborn when he was abandoned on the doorstep of a gentleman doctor. Though raised with love, he is driven to discover his true origins.

Convinced Sir Thaddeus Ormond knows something, Julian shadows him one night—and is shocked to see a young woman thrown from Ormond’s carriage and accosted by a thug. Julian manages to save her life, but not her face and hands from horrific injuries.

Nellie Barchester doesn’t recognize the scarred, disfigured stranger in the mirror. Though the gifted doctor and engineer has done his best to repair the damage, scars ravage her body, and chill her soul with the realization that her own husband may have plotted her death.

Julian’s tenderness is a balm to her soul, and Nellie is drawn to the edge of passion by a man not repelled by her deformities. But as their pursuit of the truth draws them into London’s underbelly, they cross the path of a ruthless enemy who will stop at nothing to fulfill his schemes.

Warning: Can a brilliant but troubled doctor find happiness with a woman scarred both inside and out? A hint of the supernatural plus a night of passion spice up this Uncanny Chronicle.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Darke London:

Through the long hours of the night London pitched and groaned, a restless creature in uneasy slumber. A thousand fires flickered across its twitching back. Over rivers and hills it sprawled, swallowing up quiet fields and meadows, an insatiable protean organism powered by a life of its own. To the north, the edge of the city lapped up against ancient hamlets, preparing to overtake them one by one. And just a few miles past, surrounded by winter fields lying fallow, sat a crumbling manor house, its lichened facade bravely and futilely facing the city’s inevitable onslaught. Tonight its peace was broken by a rider galloping up the drive, his horse all afroth, a limp figure clasped in front of him. They slithered to a halt outside the stout oaken door. Still carrying his load, the rider dismounted awkwardly and ran towards the house.

Julian Darke battered his shoulder against the oak door. His arms were fully occupied with the comatose woman, and he dared not set her down. In his agitation he had some strange notion she would disintegrate if he loosened his hold.

“Figgs! Open up,” he bellowed, his lungs burning with the effort. Despite the frigidness of the night, sweat poured down his back, soaking into his shirt and britches. He kicked at the front door with his scuffed boots and cursed like a tar.

On the other side of the oak, heavy feet shuffled, then a key rattled in the lock, and the door finally groaned open. Julian barged in, shoving aside the lumbering manservant.

“Call my father,” Julian ordered. “Rouse him if you must. Quick, man. Don’t just gawp there. Can’t you see this is a dire emergency?”

Not pausing in his stride, he moved down the dimly lit hallway. His shoulder muscles twinged under the weight of the woman in his arms. She couldn’t have weighed much, but he’d held her debilitated form steady on his mount for what had felt like hours, and his limbs shrilled for respite.
Not yet, not yet
. The peril had not yet passed.

He kicked open the door to his father’s examination room. Despite the darkness he trod surefooted to the table in the centre of the room, where he gingerly lowered his burden onto the surface. Not the faintest sound issued from the bundle of cloak that was the woman he’d carried home. His throat tightened. Surely she hadn’t perished just when he’d brought her to safety?

“Julian? What’s going on?”

He turned to see his father entering the room. Despite the lateness of the hour, Elijah Darke was still fully dressed in suit and waistcoat, reading spectacles perched on the end of his nose, an unlit pipe in his hand.

“This woman needs our help.” Julian gestured towards the figure lying on the table. “She’s gravely injured. She needs both our expertise.”

Pocketing his pipe, Elijah approached the table and turned on the twin lamps suspended above the examining table. Julian let out a small sigh of relief. In a crisis, his father was always clear-headed. He would act first and ask questions later.

“What have we here?” Elijah lifted the stained cloak covering the woman. He froze. “God in heaven! Her face—”

Julian nodded grimly. He had seen her face earlier on and, after a cursory examination, had instinctively hidden it with her cloak.

“Good grief, son, you’re injured too!” His father’s face whitened as he stared at Julian. “You’re covered with blood.” He moved towards Julian and hauled open the lapels of his rumpled coat.

“A few scratches only. Most of the blood is hers.” Impatient, Julian tore off his bloodied coat and dropped it to the floor. “It’s nothing, Father, nothing compared to her wounds.”

His father made a testy growl. “Your injuries need proper seeing to.”

“Later.”

“You cannot assist me in that state. At the very least wash your hands.” Elijah divested himself of his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and scrubbed his hands at a washstand.

Julian hurriedly followed suit, flung on one of his father’s clean aprons and within moments was back at the table. His father had peeled the cloak back from the woman’s body and was bending over her.

“Well?” Julian asked.

His father grunted. “See for yourself.”

For some reason, instead of staring rudely at her exposed face, he found himself reaching for the hood of the cloak and smoothing it back from the woman’s head. A handful of brown curls tumbled out, incongruously bright and clean and fresh against the oozing mess staining everything else. The tang of spilt blood hit the back of his throat, like the taste of pennies. He swallowed hard, aware of his roiling innards. Why was the smell of blood unmanning him like this? Since he was old enough to walk, he’d assisted his father. He had lanced boils, drained suppurating wounds, stitched up gaping cuts, all with nary a wince. And he was a qualified doctor too. He’d dissected corpses, amputated arms and legs, trepanned a number of patients. In all these years he’d never suffered a queasy turn, and yet now his stomach threatened to unman him. Why now? Why did this woman affect him so?

She was a stranger to him; he’d never laid eyes on her before this evening. It must simply be his body protesting, sapped of energy after the tribulations he’d faced tonight. He willed his nerves to steady as he took a proper look at the woman.

Under the harsh, hissing light, the white of her face was crisscrossed with deep gashes, like a peach haphazardly sliced open. Mercifully both eyes appeared intact and unharmed. Congealing blood spattered the front of her dress, the pattern of the faded cotton submerged beneath the sticky mess. A swelling contusion on her right temple indicated the heavy blow which had rendered her insensate.

Elijah lifted up one of the woman’s hands. “What happened here?” His voice was rough with disbelief.

Julian could only shake his head at the bloodied stumps, all that was left of the middle and ring fingers. He had bound his handkerchief as best he could around the hand, but there had been considerable loss of blood, and the fingers had been crudely removed, leaving behind a messy lump of flesh.

“Can we save her hand?” he asked.

“We shall do our best.”

Using a sharp pair of scissors, Elijah began to cut off the woman’s dress in order to complete his examination. As the shears tore through the thin material, the woman moaned. It was no more than a murmur, but it seemed the most blood-curdling sound Julian had ever heard. She squirmed, her flailing arms almost knocking the scissors from Elijah’s hand.

“Hold her down, son,” Elijah barked.

Julian obeyed, but the instant he pressed down on the woman’s shoulders, her eyelids flew open. Two green eyes stared up at him, frozen in a moment of sheer terror. With the glaring lights overhead, he must appear like a dark silhouette looming over her, Julian surmised. And then every thought fled from him as she started to shriek and thrash her limbs, struggling with all her might to free herself.

Lord Regret’s Price

Joely Sue Burkhart

A devilish alliance, sparked by imperial blood…

A Jane Austen Space Opera, Book 3

After weeks of travel, Lord Sigmund Regret’s nerves are frayed. He’s gone too long without a mark, but that’s not the only thing making him edgy. Once the reality of his profession sinks in, he wonders how his Lady Charlotte Wyre will feel when he comes to her bed with fresh blood on his hands.

Of course, the other man in her life adds more stress to an already complicated relationship. Gilead Masters’s needs are so…
normal…
compared to Sig’s, which leaves Charlotte turning to him to explore her darkening fantasies. Bondage is one thing. But pain? That’s too close to his bloodline’s violent weakness for Sig’s comfort.

Charlotte can feel Sig pulling away, but there is no time to heal the rift before they land in Zijin, where she is immediately attacked. Britannia’s reach is long, and Queen Majel’s reach is even deeper—and more deadly. As Imperial politics come to a dangerous boil, Charlotte must risk everything to keep her beloved assassin alive, free, and at her side.

Even as he searches for his next mark.

Warning: Ladies in positions of power, a dragon alien, and a BDSM ménage à trois featuring a duchess on the run, a gentlemanly assassin, and a rough-and-tumble sheriff willing to gun down anyone who gets between him and his lady.

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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Samhain Publishing, Ltd.

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Lord Regret’s Price

Copyright © 2013 by Joely Sue Burkhart

ISBN: 978-1-61921-976-2

Edited by Tera Kleinfelter

Cover by Kanaxa

All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
electronic publication: December 2013

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