Award-winning author Jillian Hunter spins a captivating new tale of sweet mystery, reckless temptation, and scandalous desire.Adrian Ruxley may be a ruggedly charming rogue, but he's not a man to stand idly by while a lady is accosted--even at a wedding organized by the lady herself, Emma Boscastle, instructress in the social graces at her London academy for young gentlewomen. Adrian confronts the offender, a scuffle ensues, and now this smooth-talking heir is left to recuperate under Emma's very roof, delighted to see the deep concern in her lovely face. She has a charm no scoundrel can resist. Emma is scandalized by her own behavior--seduced by a handsome stranger, indeed! How will she be able to hide her indiscretion from the perceptive Boscastle siblings? The divine passion that Adrian has unleashed, and the sensual delights he has shown her, have suddenly turned Emma's days at the fledgling academy into a display of impropriety and her nights into a velvet abyss of sensual abandon. But as their intimacy reveals Adrian's turbulent secrets, Emma is inspired to her most ambitious endeavor: redeeming a rake.From the Paperback edition.
**Jillian Hunter is the author of twenty-one published novels. Her books have been printed in twelve languages and have appeared on the New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists.**
I was born in Scotland where I spent my earliest years in a three-story late Georgian house that my grandmother had bought as a home to rehabilitate Allied soldiers after World War II. She was an amazing woman who had worked for the Free French and as an emergency nurse in her native Wales during the Blitz. She once threw an incendiary bomb that had landed in her parlour out the window while her family slept.
Sometimes we lived above the winding staircase of her Scottish house. Sometimes we lived in the servants’ quarters below where I helped the housemaids and worked an ingenious device known as a dumb waiter.
My mother had left school at fourteen to work as a switchboard operator in Wales during the war. Years later at a dance in Scotland a handsome blue-eyed American fell down a flight of stairs at her feet. He proposed to her that night.
My father was an Intelligence and Executive Officer to the Senior Coast Guard Office Europe. We moved to London when I started school. I didn’t realize it at the time, but he was a writer, too. While I was playing with the hedgehog and fairies in our garden, and reading, always reading, he was writing the book on maritime law in Geneva and at the Hague. He set precedent that is followed today. Eventually we left London to live in America.
Later in life I planned to return to London and become a Shakespearean actress. But then one fateful Friday the thirteenth I met a bass player in a band. He quoted to me from The Taming of the Shrew. His nickname was Beast. Over 25 years, a BA in French, three daughters, and twenty-one books later, I am still married to the man I tamed.
