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THE GRUDGING CONSORT

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Blurb

SAM PATTERSON 's picture-perfect courtship and engagement to the man of his dreams is proof of his blessed life making many envious. But when his betrothal takes a disastrous turn, Sam’s only hope to restore his tarnished reputation comes from a most shocking source—the cold, disturbingly sensual brother of the man who just shattered his heart and abandoned him. Perhaps he’s not as blessed as he’d always thought !

STEVE HATHWAY is accustomed to cleaning up after his impulsive and selfish brother. After all, he’s done it his whole life. The latest debacle, though, is much worse than usual. This time, his brother’s actions have threatened not only their family name, but Steve’s own happiness. The only honorable choice is to marry Sam. But while he knows he can repair the damage to his beautiful new husband’s reputation, mending his broken heart might prove infinitely more difficult.

It’s not long before the lines between duty and passion blur, and Steve finds himself in the inconvenient position of falling for his new husband. Will his love be enough to convince Sam to let their marriage of convenience become the happily ever after they both deserve?

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INCEPTION
 The moors spread out on either side of him like an unrolled parchment. A particularly crumbly unrolled parchment, filled with the details of religious practices in ancient Pythia, perhaps. Although Pythia had at least been known for its fig wine and moonlit dances among the olive groves. Owen frowned. He was probably being rather too kind to Trewebury and its environs. If anyone could produce a single drop of fig wine within a hundred miles, he’d eat his unfashionably low-crowned hat. And as for moonlit dances — Owen sniggered at the thought of his staid father, belly straining against his brown-striped waistcoat, cavorting in the moonlight. It would take a deal of fig wine to bring that about. The moors had very little to recommend them, too, in any light. They had a certain bleak grandeur, Owen supposed, but mostly they had drizzle, and low, prickly bushes that caught at one’s ankles, and the occasional surly sheep. And Owen. He was there, seemingly for always, and seemingly always alone. He could forget that, though, once he reached the cliffs that bounded the moors to the west. The glory of the ocean spread out before him seemed temptingly close despite the hundred feet of cliff-face that stood between him and it. Gulls swooped and wheeled, their calls echoing the shrill and terrifying cries of Mirreith, their patron goddess. And Owen’s, due to the sigil she placed on his body while he was still in the womb. At least he had their company — the gulls and the goddess. Although the latter had been marked by her absence since troubling to claim him some decades before; Owen would have welcomed some sign of what her plan for him might be, even if that came in the form of a portentous seagull. He watched for a little while, but the gulls did nothing but circle, occasionally diving down to examine some presumably delicious bit of slimy ocean detritus on the shore below. If the goddess meant him to take some meaning from that, he lacked the intelligence to discern it. With a sigh, Owen turned back, away from the setting sun and toward home, where his parents would soon expect him for dinner. He tramped across the moors as often as he could escape on his own from his family’s dull and respectable home, for there was simply nowhere else to go. Trewebury was more than a mere village; it was the local market town and busy enough in the mornings when tradesmen and farmers plied their services and wares in the central square and along the several streets that led into it. But it was entirely devoid of anything that could excite a young fellow of two-and-twenty with no interest in the girls who flocked to the market with their baskets. Not that Owen would excite them, either. Trewebury was small enough that everyone knew of the goddess-touched in their midst. He wished, most passionately some days, that he could hide what he was. The town’s young women either giggled at the very thought of him, or — often worse — thought to treat him as one of their own, an impulse he knew had its root in kindness, but one that left him feeling less of a man but not nearly a woman, either. He tried not to think of what the town’s young men thought of him; if they thought of him at all, Owen suspected it was in terms he would not find flattering. The sun sank deeper into the heavy bank of fog closing in from the sea, and the moor before him lost all its remaining color. One stray shaft of light still highlighted the top of a granite tor about a mile distant, the gently rolling swells of grass surrounding it only the gloomier and more featureless by contrast. It didn’t matter. He knew this stretch of moor as well as he knew his own bedchamber. Owen set a course just to the right of the tor, planning to scramble down a bit of hillside and meet the path that led around the foot rather than circling to it across flatter ground. Just as he reached the top of the slope, the sound of hoofbeats startled him out of his reverie, and he jumped, slipped, and with a cry, went tumbling down. There was the scrape of gravel on his palms, and the slide of scree beneath his flailing legs; the ground and the sky whirled in a sickening dance, and then he landed flat on his back with a crunch, his head swimming. He blinked, and flinched as a few more bits of gravel pattered down. When he blinked again, a dark, rather wavery shape blotted out what was left of the light. A giant frowning hat? That couldn’t possibly be right. Owen tried to push himself up onto his elbows, only to be gently but firmly pushed back down again. “Don’t try to move,” said a deep rasp of a voice. “You’ve most likely struck your head on something on the way down.” The shape removed its hat and resolved into a broad-shouldered gentleman, his face still too blurry to make out in detail — except for the outline of his expression. Of course. It was the man’s face that was frowning. That made a great deal more sense. Owen tried to laugh, felt very sick, and rolled to the side, retching and barely able to see, and then not seeing at all. “For the last time, mother, I don’t remember precisely why I fell!” Owen’s voice sounded weak and querulous even to himself; small wonder that his mother had forbidden him to rise from bed. “I was on my way home. I must have been, for I set out an hour before and couldn’t possibly have still been only a mile from home. I must have slipped, that’s all.” Mrs. Honeyfield turned away from the fireplace, where she had been venting her frustrations by prodding a poker at the remains of the coals as a knight of old might have wielded a broadsword. Watery early-afternoon sunshine pouring through the bedchamber’s one tall window showed the ancient scuffs in the oak flooring that no quantity of polish could ever quite eradicate; it illuminated the whole landscape of Owen’s circumscribed life, his books neatly on the cheap desk, the washstand with its chipped ewer, the frayed blue dressing gown on a hook by the bed. And most of all, his mother’s round face, usually calm but lined today with worry. “And you wouldn’t have been able to slip and fall if you hadn’t been clambering about on the rocks,” she said, “as your father and I have told you a thousand times not to do, if we’ve told you once…” Long practiced in filtering out his mother’s scolding, well-deserved as it often was, Owen closed his eyes and drifted through what he could remember of his accident. It wasn’t much; he’d told her the truth when he said he recalled little more than a painful blank. Since it had been three days already and his head had mostly cleared, he was hardly likely to remember more. The memory ached, though, like a sore tooth that he could neither pull nor ignore. He had fallen, and then, after that, he had a strange impression of safety and warmth, although that seemed the wrong reaction to a concussion. “…and if not for Mr. Drake and his brother, you might have died!” she finished in a crescendo of righteous indignation. She had recaptured Owen’s attention with her mention of the Drakes, two brothers who had taken up residence in a manor a mile outside of Trewebury only a few days before Owen’s accident. They were the talk of the whole town, not that it had done the inhabitants much good. The gentlemen hadn’t yet deigned to appear anywhere they could be gawked at. Probably, come to think of it, for that precise reason. They had brought him home with great care, according to his mother, gallantly carrying him all the way so that he wouldn’t be jostled on horseback. She had been maddeningly vague as to their personal attributes, merely, and infuriatingly, telling him that they were all that young gentlemen should be, to be sure. He was quite wild to get a look for himself, and he knew they had called to ask after him. Not just one potentially handsome gentleman, but two! What if they lost interest before he could even catch a glimpse of them? It would be a tragedy. “I’m well enough now to see them, don’t you think?” Owen asked plaintively. “Not until you’re well enough to take your meals downstairs,” she said with crushing firmness. Which he was, if only she and father would stop fussing over him. At least he wanted to be. What he really wanted were more details of his apparent rescue, the extraordinarily romantic — Owen would not describe it that way to his parents for all the gold in the world — part of the story in which a handsome gentleman bore Owen’s swooning form across the moors, muscular arms flexing, long powerful legs eating up the distance easily…he veered quickly away from that line of thought. He had recovered quite enough for certain parts of his body to show their interest, and only the hem of a nightshirt and a light blanket covered his lower half. His mother chose that moment to turn back from the small items on his bureau that she had begun to rearrange and dust with rather more force than necessary, and Owen shifted guiltily and adjusted the coverlet. His irritation with himself came out in a brusque, “Would you please stop thumping things about?” She set her hands on her hips and glared at him. “If you can’t bear the noise of a little neatening-up, then you’re not well enough to receive callers. Besides,” she said with that little quirk to her lips that always meant Owen was about to lose an argument, “you’re as pale as a sea-wraith and not nearly as like to lure a man to his doom, if you catch my meaning.” Owen glared in his turn. “I’m not so very bad, I thank you. And anyhow, pale and interesting is a — something gentlemen might find appealing, isn’t it? Cousin Julia’s friend, that young lady she met at the assembly, do you remember her? She’s always swanning about with her fan and her smelling-salts, and she has men falling over themselves to court her.” “Miss Bowman is the heiress to a large fortune.” “But mother —” “And,” she went on ruthlessly, “your freckles are twice as visible when you don’t have any color in your face.” Well. Owen really had no answer to that, and he subsided against his pillows, entirely defeated. He did freckle terribly, no matter what sort of hat he wore, and a sea of dark spots stark against a sickly pallor was not the image he wanted to present to the Drakes. “You’re lovely, my dear,” his mother said, in a softer tone. “Freckles and all. But you need your rest, for now. Dr. Fellowes said you were to stay in bed quietly for a full week, and I’ll keep you there if I have to sit on you.” “Fine. But I think the quietly part needs a bit of work on your part, Mama. Ow,” he said, as she flicked him on the nose, and then “Mother,” when she followed that up with a kiss to his forehead. He had quite outgrown that sort of thing. Though at that gentle touch, he sank deeper into the mattress, suddenly very cozy and sleepy in a way only one’s mother could induce. “Oh, get on with you,” she said, sounding as fond as anything. “I’ll bring you some tea in a while.” Owen dreamed of a faceless man with broad shoulders and capable hands, carrying him through the twilight and murmuring comforting nonsense as Owen’s face rested against his chest.

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