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Let me know if you’re hooked by THE DEBUTANTE’S DILEMMA. A commenter will win their  copy of Elyse’s ebook!

One woman in search of passion

Miss Cecilia Hastings has achieved what every young lady hopes for during her first London season…in duplicate! She’s caught the eye of not one but two of England’s most eligible bachelors.   Both Jeremy Battersley, Earl of Henley, and Richard Huxley, Duke of Wexford are handsome, wealthy and kind, the epitome of proper gentlemen. But Cecelia doesn’t want proper, she wants passion. So she issues a challenge to her suitors: a kiss, so that she may choose between them.

Two men in love with the same woman

Friends since childhood, and compatriots on the battlefields of Spain, falling for the same woman has set Jeremy and Richard at odds, and risks destroying their friendship forever.  But a surprising invitation to a late-night garden tryst soon sets them on a course that neither of them could have anticipated. And these gentlemen quickly discover that love can take many forms…

Available now from Carina Press and E-book retailers.

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THE DEBUTANTE’S DILEMMA by Elyse Mady
Word Count: 22,000    Format: eBook
Now Available from Carina Press

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He shouldn’t have left.

Not like that.

As he sat in the darkness of his swaying carriage, Jeremy Battersley swore and slammed his clenched fist against the deep leather squabs. The look on Wexford’s face when he’d cut him tonight ate at him and yet, despite his disgust, he knew there’d been no other course.

Not when he was being eaten alive by such molten, spewing jealousy.

Jeremy was still man enough to be ashamed of such low feelings, even if he could not control their aim. But it gave him little comfort, for he knew their days of friendship were numbered and it grieved him deeply.

He was not a man who spoke easily of his feelings and never had been. His father’s early death, shortly before he arrived at Eton, had left him wary and distrustful of laying open his affections, still mourning as he’d been the passing of a well-loved parent. Jeremy learned too quickly that many of the boys were merely interested in currying the favour of a newly appointed peer and cared not at all for the boy behind the weighty titles, the friendship they’d offered contingent on self-interest or vanity. But Wexford had been different.

A tall lanky boy, his dark hair always askew and his nose generally buried in a book of Latin prose, he’d never tried to insinuate himself into Jeremy’s good graces. Of course, two minutes leafing through Debrett’s peerage would show Dick Huxley had no need to toad eat, standing as he did to inherit titles and wealth that rivalled, if not exceeded his own. Steady, ferociously clever and loyal, these were all words that described his best friend and they were attributes that had not changed in the intervening years. Somehow the mournful little boy and the abstracted young scholar had become friends and friends they had stayed.

Until now.

It wasn’t surprising really, the complication they now found themselves in, when you looked at the situation with a dispassionate eye. Their taste in women had always been remarkably similar. They both admired clever, handsome women, who carried themselves with grace and could express themselves with wit and intelligence. Sensuous women who, through looks and presence, proclaimed their interest in love and bed play and physical sensation.

Cecilia Hastings offered all of these things and more, though her potential for lovemaking was entirely unconscious and untried. In fact, that made her even more deadly, for the possibility of being the man to unleash that latent desire had been enough to keep him rock-hard for weeks on end.

He remembered Wexford’s expression when he’d first told him about Cecilia. They’d been playing billiards in Jeremy’s fine home in Grosvenor Square, as they had done a thousand times before. On a normal night, they were well-matched but his mind still fixed on the haunting beauty he spied that morning at court, he played abysmally, his shots careening across the table with all the effectiveness of a blunderbuss against a French cavalry charge.

“Are you quite well?” his friend had asked, as another ball missed its mark so widely that it hadn’t even threatened the pocket towards which he’d been nominally aiming.

“I think I am in love,” Jeremy said, the words startling him even as he knew them to be true.

His stunning admission had elicited nothing more than a raised eyebrow from Wexford and hadn’t disrupted his ability to make his shot in the slightest, either.

“Indeed?” he said, moving round the low table to size up his next approach. Wexford paused, considering the lay of the balls on the hot-pressed felt, and chalked his tip. “And what do you love most about this lady? Her tragedy? Her comedy? Or perhaps it is her ability to sing light opera?” He leaned over the table as he spoke and carefully stroked his shot in preparation.

“Her feathers. Her white ostrich feathers.”

Balls had scattered and skipped across the table when Wexford’s cue plowed into the felt at Jeremy’s steady statement. Because without another word being spoken, they knew, as anyone who spent any time amongst the Ton must know, what that simple avowal meant.

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About the author, Elyse Mady:

An enthusiastic and voracious reader of everything from 18th century novels to misplaced cereal boxes, Elyse has worked as a freelance magazine writer for the past several years.  Her first work of fiction, The Debutante’s Dilemma, was published by Carina Press in November, 2010.

She blogs at www.elysemady.wordpress.com about writing, research and romance novels, both historical and contemporary.  You can reach her by email at elysemady@cogeco.ca or find her on Facebook and Twitter (@ElyseMady) for updates and upcoming titles .