Spotlight & Giveaway: Curled Up with an Earl by Amy Rose Bennett

Today, HJ is pleased to share with you Amy Rose Bennett’s new release: Curled Up with an Earl

As an unexpected but undeniable passion flares between Lucy and Will, confidences are exchanged and dark secrets come to light. But will a murderer, determined to stay hidden, destroy their chances of finding a happy-ever-after?

Miss Lucy Bertram is content to spend her days writing scientific articles or curling up with a Gothic romance novel. Indeed, she’d rather stick a hatpin in her eye than attend a ball. But when her father, the eccentric botanist Sir Oswald, insists she accept the suit of a wealthy but stiffer-than-a-poker industrialist to save the family from penury, Lucy decides to act. She’s certain her disowned brother, Monty, will take her side. But first she must find him in St. Giles’s cutthroat rookeries.

A covert agent for the Crown, William Lockhart, the Earl of Kyle, is on the hunt for a ruthless killer determined to destroy the Linnean Society. Sir Oswald, a botanical poisons expert, is the prime suspect. Posing as a groom in the baronet’s household, it shouldn’t take Will long to unearth the evidence Scotland Yard needs. If only the beguiling Miss Bertram wasn’t so damn distracting…

Enjoy an exclusive excerpt from Curled Up with an Earl 

Hampstead Heath, Summer 1858

At the age of eight-and-twenty, Miss Lucy Bertram could easily, perhaps even quite confidently, define the sort of person she was: thoughtful, analytical, observant, practical, diligent, imaginative, kind.
Also, most unfortunately, quivering-like-a-barely-set-blancmange nervous around strangers—particularly members of the opposite sex who were prospective suitors. Indeed, the mere idea of entering a high-society gathering such as a ball or a soiree—even a dinner party—where countless sets of eyes were bound to settle upon her, was enough to make her feel positively faint with terror or cast up her accounts. Possibly both.
Although, at this present moment, Lucy was completely alone in a deserted rural laneway—unless one counted her family’s ancient pony, Juniper, as company—so she wasn’t nervous precisely. However, she could certainly own to feeling more than a little anxious and a great deal flummoxed. And while her powers of observation still appeared to be intact, her practical streak had all but deserted her. Because she simply had no clue how to dislodge the mired back wheel of her gig from a muddy ditch. At all.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, there was a summer storm grumbling on the horizon. The roiling bank of dark-as-a-bruise clouds that had been brewing over London since midday was drawing ever closer, and the ominous low rumbles of thunder were making poor Juniper stamp and snort and twitch.
Of course, when Lucy had set out from her home, Fleetwood Hall, less than an hour ago to run a few errands in the nearby hamlet of Heathwick Green, she had noticed clouds amassing above Hampstead Heath, along with an unmistakable heavy sultriness in the air. It was the sort of sticky humidity that promised a downpour. But she’d dismissed any nagging concerns because Heathwick Green was so close to home, and it wasn’t as though she hadn’t made this trip with Juniper a thousand times over. And while the lane was muddy from a heavy rain shower earlier in the day, for the most part, it wasn’t particularly boggy or hazardous.
However, what Lucy hadn’t counted on was the enormous brown hare that had decided to dart from the prickly briar hedge, straight across Juniper’s path. The hare’s lightning speed and proximity had startled the usually unflappable pony and sent him off course toward the verge where the drainage was poor, and now they were well and truly stuck. No matter how much Lucy attempted to coax Juniper forward with gentle flicks of the reins and encouraging words, the gig hadn’t budged more than an inch.
Fudge and fiddlesticks and fiddle-dee-dee. Huffing out an exasperated sigh, Lucy resigned herself to the fact she was going to get dirty and probably drenched to the bone as she gathered up her wide crinoline skirts of faded blue muslin and climbed down from the gig. As her kid leather boots sank into a patch of sucking mud, she winced. To say that her maid, Dotty, would not be happy would be an understatement.
Lucy wasn’t particularly happy either, not when she glanced under the gig and spotted the extent of the problem—or should she say the depth of it? The ditch was a veritable quagmire, and there was no doubt in her mind that Juniper wouldn’t have the strength to pull the vehicle free. It was rather a shame that “brute strength” wasn’t one of her own defining attributes, because then she might be able to give Juniper a helping hand with a bit of a heave-ho from the rear.
On the positive side, Fleetwood Hall wasn’t that far away. If she unstrapped Juniper and led him home—there was no way Lucy could ride bareback in her present attire—they’d be there within twenty minutes, and they might escape the approaching tempest. But that would also mean she’d have to abandon the gig, and while she liked to think that no one would make off with it, someone might.
That eventuality would be nothing short of a disaster. Her father, Sir Oswald, could ill afford such a loss. They were already down to a skeleton staff at Fleetwood Hall, and as it was, Lucy was constantly battling to make ends meet with the limited household budget her father had allocated. The loss of the gig simply couldn’t be borne. Not by her father, or herself. The little two-seater carriage meant that she could go wherever she liked, whenever she liked…even if that was just to Heathwick Green or to the village of Hampstead to run errands. Or, most importantly, to the train station so she could travel to London to meet with her friends and fellow Byronic Book Club members, Jane Delaney and Artemis Winters, the newly wedded Duchess of Dartmoor.

Excerpt. ©Amy Rose Bennett. Posted by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
 
 

Giveaway: A Paperback copy of CURLED UP WITH AN EARL

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Meet the Author:

Amy Rose Bennett is an Australian author who has a passion for penning emotion-packed historical romances. Of course, her strong-willed heroines and rakish heroes always find their happily ever after. A former speech pathologist, Amy is happily married to her very own romantic hero and has two lovely, very accomplished adult daughters. When she’s not creating stories, Amy loves to cook up a storm in the kitchen, lose herself in a good book or a witty rom-com, and when she can afford it, travel to all the places she writes about.
 
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