Sunday Share time! Working with Soul Mate Publishing, I’ve met some wonderful people who just happen to be fabulous authors and Petie is one of the best ❤ So it is my great pleasure to share her Regency, time travel romance, Duke du Jour.
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Jared Langley, thirteenth Duke of Reston, discovers an overgrown garden on his family estate, stumbles into a dilapidated fountain, and awakens in 1816.
BLURB:
…a light-hearted time travel romance where a bewildered modern-day duke ends up in Regency England and meets the girl of his dreams……a reverse Kate and Leopold…
Jared Langley, present-day Duke of Reston, tumbles into an abandoned fountain on his ducal estate and travels back in time to the year 1816. There, Reston servants and local villagers think him a dead ringer for his namesake and rakehell ancestor—the seventh Duke of Reston, gone missing at the Battle of Waterloo. Unfortunately, Seven got mixed up with French spies out to assassinate the Duke of Wellington, and an unwary Jared ends up in their crosshairs.
Lady Ariana Hart has loved Jared Langley, the seventh Duke of Reston, since she was twelve years old, until the night the rogue broke her heart. Given up for dead, her rakish neighbor makes a miraculous return from Waterloo—only Jared shows up a changed man and reignites all the feelings Ariana had long ago buried.
Jared is in a race against time. He must waylay the suspicions of his quirky servants and neighbors, get to Wellington before the French spies do, fix his fountain—before Seven shows up—so Jared has a way home, and definitely not fall in love with the irresistible Lady Ariana.
BUY LINKS:
Amazon: Duke du Jour
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Amazon: Australia
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Amazon: Denmark
Amazon: Spain
Amazon: France
Amazon: Italy
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ABOUT PETIE:
Petie spent a large part of her career working at Walt Disney World — “The Most Magical Place on Earth” — where she enjoyed working in the land of fairy tales by day and creating her own romantic fairy tales by night, including her new series, The Cinderella Romances. She eventually said good-bye to her “day” job to write her stories full-time. These days Petie spends her time writing sequels to her regency time-travel series, Lords in Time, and her cozy-mystery-with-elements-of-romantic-suspense series, the Mystery Angel Romances.
Petie shares her home on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee with her horticulturist husband, a spoiled-rotten English Springer spaniel addicted to pimento-stuffed green olives, and a noisy Nanday conure named Sassy who made a cameo appearance in Angel to the Rescue.
Visit Petie’s web site online at http://www.petiemccarty.com or her Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/petie.mccarty.
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EXCERPT:
Jared awoke in a less-than-comfortable bed, in a room that looked familiar. Appropriately enough, his family had always referred to this room as the Georgian bedroom with its Hepplewhite armoire and dressers. He struggled to a sitting position in the middle of the four-poster bed only to have an oddly dressed woman surge forward. No, wait, she was dressed normally; hewas the one oddly attired. He let loose a groan.
“Ye’ve got a nasty bump on the back of yer head. Lie back, Master Jared. The doctor stepped out for only a minute. He will be right back, and ye do not want to move the little buggers.”
“What little buggers?” He followed her gaze to his arms. “Gaah! Get them off!” he shouted. “Get them off!”
He clawed at the brown leeches stuck to his arms and noticed his pants rolled to his knees and more of the insidious creatures clinging to his calves and shins. He switched back and forth between scraping at his forearms and scraping at his shins.
“See here!” a deep voice boomed. “Leave those on.”
A white-haired man in a tailored jacket and trousers came running and forced him back down in the bed.
Jared shoved the man backward several feet in his panic. “Get off me!”
He resumed clawing at the slimy invertebrates anchored to his skin. He scraped with his nails and managed to pull free one end of a rather large blob only to have the sucker reattach when he picked at the opposite end.
“Get them off!” he roared at the jacketed man and then with a blast of sudden insight, “I commandyou this instant!”
That got the man’s attention. That and Jared’s ticked-offglare that sent normal men scurrying for cover—some genetic effrontery he must have inherited from autocratic ancestors, though the glare often came in handy.
“Dr. Padwick, should ye be removing them?” the woman asked timidly. “Cook says the master hit his head, and he might not be right. And look at them clothes.”
Jared turned his genetic glare on her, and she clamped her lips shut.
The doctor hesitated, and Jared barked, “Off! Now!”
The man resumed scraping the indolent creatures from Jared’s arm with some type of spatula, which left angry red welts in their wake.
“They were not even on long enough to break the skin,” the quack Padwick muttered.
“Thank God for small favors.” The comment earned Jared a frown. “Padwick, you say?”
The man paused to stare. “You have known me the whole of your life, Your Grace.” He reached out to feel Jared’s forehead for fever.
He jerked away. “I’m fine. Keep picking.”
With a resigned sigh, Padwick returned the last of the miscreants to their traveling jars, and Jared exhaled hard. He had read about the depraved medicinal procedure of using leeches for curing everything from a cold to a stab wound in this century, but suffering the application shed new light on the imbecilic theory. How could anyone think removing blood from your body could heal you? And with germ-covered leeches no less? Even if part of the blood was truly tainted, there was no guarantee the leeches would suck out the right corpuscles.
“You honestly believe sticking those slabs of slime on my skin would truly cure a headache?” he asked, affronted.
“A headache, no. That would need willow-bark tea. A bad bump on the head needs leeches to reduce the swelling inside your skull,” the so-called doctor clarified.
“And if my headache and the nasty bump on my head should go away on their own?”
The doctor drew himself up to his full, though average, height. “Luck.”
Jared felt for a lump. Sure enough, an egg-sized bump had risen at the back of his skull.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” the quack asked, waving two in front of his face.
Jared did a mental eye roll. “Two.”
“And what year is it?”
He hesitated, then answered, “Eighteen sixteen.”
The doctor looked satisfied, and a wave of dizziness swept over Jared again. He had to be dreaming! How the devil had he arrived back in the nineteenth century? Time travel was impossible except in motion pictures.
He started to pinch himself to check on the dreaming thing and noticed the round pink blotches on his arm. The damned leeches had been real enough. All his problems had started with that blasted fountain in the back garden. One minute he was in the twenty-first century, the next minute back with King George and Napoleon.
The woman and the idiot doctor were staring warily at him. He had obviously been acting strangely in their minds, and dressed as he was, he had no doubt created a stir there, too. He wanted to know who the woman attending him was—hell, he wanted to know who everyone here was. Without modern appliances, Duke Seven probably retained a small army of servants to care for the manor.
These people obviously all knew him, but if he kept asking strange questions, they could have him shipped off to Bedlam, the realBedlam, or rather the old Bethlem Hospital where he would never be seen or heard from again. Thank God—and he had been doing a lot of that today—for the historical research he had done on his ancestors and their respective periods in history. Would that not be a kick in the arse? To be stuck in the nineteenth century andcommitted? Hell, he would never get back to the future.
An idea struck—pure genius.
“Er, Dr. Padwick?”
The old doctor shifted his disapproving stare from his jars of horror back to Jared. “Yes, Your Grace?” he responded with all the professional hauteur he could manage.
“Could one lose part of one’s memory with a sufficient blow to the head?”
A gamble sure, but Jared could not gain necessary information by waiting around. He certainly could not tell these people the truth, or he would be strapped into the first carriage to Bedlam.
Padwick’s shoulders slumped with relief. “Why, yes, Master Jared, I believe that is entirely possible.”
The quack felt back in charge, and Jared had obviously been forgiven as he was back to being Master Jared.
“Areyou having memory lapses?” Padwick asked, his tone rhetorical to the point of smug.
“I believe I am. I mean, look at how I’m dressed. Where on earth would I get these clothes?”
“Er, the continent?” Padwick offered. “I’m told you fought in the battle at Waterloo. Maybe you received a head injury there and aggravated it today?”
“Yes, possibly. Would you happen to know how old I am?”
Padwick looked incredulous. “Well, you have been gone two years, so that would make you thirty years of age according to my records.”
Good Lord, that really is my age.
“I know who I am, but I do not remember you or―” He looked pointedly at the older woman.
“Heddy,” the woman said, brightening. “Heddy Demarr. I have been yer housekeeper for almost thirty years.”
“Heddy,” he repeated and smiled.
She bobbed her head.
“How many servants doI have?”
“Not nearly enough,” said Curricle Man who had just strolled in.
Padwick had his back turned as he busily packed the traveling leech circus into his doctor bag. Jared inclined his head at the quack and gave Curricle Man a not-in-front-of-him look.
“Well, there’s Cook and Chappy and us,” Heddy said and smiled at Curricle Man. “Then there’s Shirley Duckett, the upstairs maid, and Ella, her older sister, is the downstairs maid.” She began ticking off her fingers. “Wiggs, your valet.” Another finger. “Thomas, the gardener.” Touched a pinkie. “Tish and Beulah, the scullery maids.” Then a thumb. “Dart and Wink, who works the stables. And—”
“That’s all right. I only asked how many. I do not require all their names right now.”
“Of course, Master Jared.”
“Let me check that bump again, Your Grace,” Padwick said, suddenly all interest and concern.
Jared winced when the not-doctor swiped two fingers over the lump. “How long will my memory lapse?” he asked, for good measure.
“No more than a week or two,” Padwick proclaimed confidently.
Pompous ass. The quack had no idea. Small wonder anyone survived in this century.
A young boy about twelve or thirteen years old suddenly burst into the room. “She’scoming up the lane!” he exclaimed.
The present occupants all stared. The poor boy shifted from one foot to the other. “She’s coming,” he repeated and gave Curricle Man a pointed look that was obviously supposed to mean something.
Jared glanced at Curricle Man, and then he raised his brows at Heddy.
“That is Bullen,” she said.
Curricle Man gaped. “You didn’t know me?”
“Not your name until this moment, no.”
“Memory loss,” Padwick added peremptorily.
“Oh,” Bullen said, making the word into several phonetic syllables.
Jared suppressed yet another eye roll. He would make his head ache worse if he did not cease. “And whois coming?”
Bullen’s eyes almost bugged out of his head. “Lady Ariana,” he wheezed, like someone was choking him.
Jared’s gaze shot to Heddy, and Bullen clapped a palm to his forehead.
“Lady Ariana Hart, the Earl of Wakefield’s daughter,” she said primly and added, “Yer playmate as a child though ye were a might older.”
Bullen groaned. “It is too late to run now. She’s probably pulled up to the steps already.”
Jared threw his legs over the side of the bed. “Surely, you did not expect me to run.”
Heddy leaned in and whispered, “I’m Heddy. Shirley’s the upstairs maid.”
Jared blinked at her, considered explaining his adverb use, and thought better of it.
“Remember, I told ye?” Heddy repeated slowly.
“Right. So, why would I run?”
Bullen and Heddy exchanged glances, and both gave a minuscule nod toward Padwick, who watched the exchange with interest.
Jared caught on. “If you are through, Dr. Padwick, you may go. I will send word if I further require your services,” he said dismissively.
The doctor gave one imperious sniff, snatched up his black bag of medicinal anomalies, and stalked for the door.
The moment the door shut behind him, Jared turned to Bullen. “Now, why would I not want to see Lady Ariana if she was my childhood playmate?”
Bullen swallowed hard and shot a worried glance at Heddy.
“Do not look at her. Answer me.”
“Well,” Bullen said slowly, keeping his eyes on the counterpane on Jared’s bed, “because of the way you had gotten to bethose last couple years before you left for the continent.”
Jared narrowed his gaze. “And how is that?”
Bullen swallowed hard a second time. “You know…dissolute.”
Jared stared in shock. Mostly because Bullen knew the word. Nineteenth-century servants were not all that well educated. He also felt insulted, though common sense told him no, since he wasn’t really the seventh Duke of Reston. He thought of the smirk on Seven’s face in Jared’s portrait gallery.
“Terribly dissolute?”
Bullen blinked. “Pretty much.”
“Ye’re a rake anda drunk,” Heddy added helpfully.
He glowered at her.
“Well, ye are. Gossip is ye’ve slept wi’ half the married ladies in London and allthe widows. Not yer fault though. Ye’ve a face like an angel,” she offered indulgently, “so the ladies flock to ye.”
Bullen nodded. “You’re a looker, and you know it.” The man finally made eye contact and looked sad about his divulgence.
Bloody hell. I am an arrogant, lecherous drunk, and I have only just arrived.