Welcome once again to Duck Chat!

Today is going to be a very fun day. We have Meredith Duran in the house!

Besides being a romance author, Meredith is a doctoral student in anthropology, loves doing field work in such places as India and browsing through library travelogues written by Nineteenth Century Englishwomen. British history is a favorite of hers and she talks about that with us today. When she needs a fix, some of her favorite historical authors are: Laura Kinsale, Judith Ivory, Loretta Chase, Sherry Thomas, Connie Brockway, Joanna Bourne, Marsha Canham, and Jo Goodman

Her books have become fan favorites, and if you haven’t read any of Meredith’s stories yet, do read on and learn all about them. She even gives us a sneak peek of her new book that’s being released next year. Be sure to leave a meaningful question or comment for Meredith because she’s going to be giving away a copy of Bound by Your Touch and Written on Your Skin. Now let’s chat!

DUCK CHAT: Meredith, I’m curious – it says on your website that you grew up enamored of British history and one of your life’s goals was to go to London to see Holbein’s portrait of Anne Boleyn. What was it that first captured your interest in British history? Have you attained that goal of seeing the Holbein?

MEREDITH DURAN: Good question! It was Shakespeare that got me hooked into my obsession with English history. I’d always been a very, er, dramatic child, so when I was about eight or nine, my parents decided to take me to a Shakespeare festival. I believe it was Richard III that we saw, since I can still recall the precise way the actor hissed the line, “You…try…my…patience!” The play was over my head, but the costumes fascinated me (I decided then and there that I was going to become a Shakespearean actor when I grew up – heh, what a great way to make a living!). The fate of the little princes also haunted me, so when we got home from the festival, I decided to ransack the local library for more information about them. This led to an interest in the Plantagenets (I had a VHS copy of Lion in Winter that wore out, I watched it so much), which yielded in high school to a fixation on the Tudors. (I made color Xeroxes of Henry VIII’s wives and plastered my dorm room wall with them. And, yes, my friends did think this was a little weird.)

DC: If you could retire any question and never, ever have it asked again, what would it be? Feel free to answer it.

MD: Ha! This question right here is a work of evil genius – asking me to admit my least favorite question, and then to answer it! I think this question is the one I’d like to see retired.

DC: One of my questions sometimes of authors is if they have an old WIP under the bed, back of the closet, shoved to the back of a drawer that they might pull out and rework. The answer is usually no. In your case, that’s exactly what happened with The Duke of Shadows, your debut book. When you were in the process of reworking it, was there ever a point when you nearly chucked the whole thing, thinking it would never work? What kept you going?

MD: Actually, I didn’t rework the manuscript until it had won the Gather/Simon & Schuster contest. Since I only had five weeks to revise it, I had no time to entertain doubts. What kept me going? The willingness of my friends to let me disappear for five weeks. Also, the utter heady thrill of knowing that the words I was placing on the page would be read by my fellow romance readers. Actually, those five weeks were the happiest of my life to date – one long, exhilarated marathon of creativity.

DC: Any other works hidden away like The Duke of Shadows that we might see some day?

MD: Most of my shelved manuscripts are the work of adolescent enthusiasm – a few fantasy manuscripts, a paranormal romance (I was ahead of the curve! Blame it on a childhood filled with LJ Smith, Christopher Pike, and Lois Lowry), nothing I would inflict on the world. However, I actually had another book pulled from beneath the bed recently –a women’s fiction novel that was agented in NY, but never sold. It’s a coming-of-age story about an Anglo-American girl whose obsession with Hindi cinema begins to warp her view of reality; in short, she starts to lead her life as though she were a heroine in a Bollywood film. (If you’ve ever watched one of these films, you can see how this might cause farcical results.)

After realizing it was never going to sell, I sort of forgot about it, until one day I mentioned it to a friend who lives in Delhi. He wanted to read it. I gave him a PDF copy. Three years on, he happened to befriend someone in publishing there; he mentioned it to her, she asked for a look, and lo and behold: it’s being published in India this fall! What a surreal and happy ending. I loved writing that book – it’s a work of pure affection, by a huge fan of Hindi films – so I’m so glad it will get an audience.

DC: While we’re talking about TDoS, tell our readers a little about the story and its characters, please.

MD: The Duke of Shadows tells the story of two star-crossed lovers who meet in India in 1857. Each of them is an outcast, Emma because her reputation is in tatters, Julian because his birth – as a ducal heir whose grandmother was Indian – offends the sensibilities of a society in which racial divisions are becoming increasingly stark. When war breaks out, they have no choice but to trust each other in their fight to survive, and in the process, they fall in love.

But war has a way of destroying happy-ever-afters. They are separated, and by the time they find each other again in London, the darkness of their pasts, and the cost of their own survival, may prove too great for their love to overcome.

DC: I’ve heard writers often say their stories take them in surprising directions, or dialogue flows from some unknown place. Is it the same with you? Do your characters surprise you sometimes?

MD: Yes, I know I’m in the zone when my writing and characters surprise me.

DC: Do you ever argue with your characters while you’re writing? Who usually wins?

MD: Nope, I never argue with them. When the writing isn’t coming easily, I like to argue with myself, though. (“Your plot is weak! What the hell were you thinking, Duran?” LOL.)

DC: What is sure to distract you from sitting down and working/writing?

MD: The internet is a terrible temptation. Good books also furnish endless distraction, but I don’t feel so guilty about that; reading seems to replenish my “well,” as it were.

DC: Your second book is Bound by Your Touch. First, are your books related in any way? Would you tell us about Viscount Sanburne and Lydia Boyce?

MD: The Duke of Shadows has no relation to any of my other books. Bound by Your Touch is related to Written on Your Skin insofar as certain characters (and part of the timeline) overlap, but each of the books stands alone, as a separate and contained story that does not require knowledge of the other.

As far as Sanburne and Lydia go – well, BBYT is an opposites-attract story, the key twist being that they’re not nearly so opposite as they might believe (and wish) themselves to be. At the beginning of the book, Lydia would tell you that Sanburne is a useless, handsome scoundrel whose only employment in life lies in breaking the rules, preferably in as spectacular a fashion as possible. Sanburne would tell you that Lydia is a self-important, overly serious bluestocking, who no doubt would be horrified to learn that her prickly façade practically begs a man to breach and dismantle it.

To Lydia’s horror and Sanburne’s amusement, these two actually end up having far more in common than they suspect.

To Sanburne’s horror and Lydia’s amusement, she has a peculiar talent for breaching and dismantling *his* façade.

Fireworks result!

DC: What has been your favorite book cover from your releases so far and why?

MD: The Duke of Shadows still reigns supreme in my heart: that minaret, the late light of sunset slanting in through the window, and the black spine made it really distinctive. Although WOYS is such a gorgeous red… Grr, it’s hard to decide.

DC: I’m going to guess that you really don’t have a least favorite cover. True? LOL, the cover gods have been mighty nice to you!

MD: True! I’ve lucked out.

DC: How do you feel your male or female characters have evolved over your career? Do you think you write them differently now than you did when you started?

MD: The Duke of Shadows was mostly Emma’s story – Julian was a swoon-worthy hero, no doubt, but he has made his peace with his own childhood traumas; the only thing that haunts him is his past with Emma. Hence the second half of that book is really about his effort to rescue her from the darkness into which she has locked herself.

On the other hand, the heroes in Bound by Your Touch and Written on Your Skin are classically “tortured” insofar as their inner conflicts are no less sizeable than that of their heroines. They’ve got to do a lot of growing before they can win their happy-ever-safter. So, if anything, I’d say that I’m growing crueler and crueler toward my heroes. Ha!

DC: Your latest release is Written on Your Skin. I love that title, by the way. We meet Phin and Mina in this book. Can you tell us about them and their story?

MD: Phin is a world-weary former spy. He was pushed into the game against his will. It stripped away all his idealism, and he is determined, for the sake of his soul, never to return to it. So when Mina Masters comes to him for help – help that would require he reenter the game – he resists with all his might. Problem is: she saved his life once. He’s indebted to her, and ultimately has no choice but to help her.

Mina is something of a femme fatale, who has learned the hard way how to use her looks and her wits to protect herself. But her fierce independence masks a serious fear of making herself vulnerable to anyone. It chafes her that she requires Phin’s help. It burns her to have to trust him. But she hasn’t any choice in it.

What ensues is a battle of wills between two very smart people who are very good at lying to themselves and others. But in each other, they have met their match.

Excerpt from Written on Your Skin:

Delhi, 1857

Julian first noticed her because she looked so bored. Waiting for the Commissioner’s arrival had put him on edge. He stood at the top of the room, half-attending to the feverish chatter around him, his eyes fixed on the door. Rumors in the bazaar daily grew darker, and it was clear to him now that if Calcutta would not act, the local government must. Tonight he meant to exact a promise on that account.
He became aware of the woman gradually. It was her stillness that drew his attention. She was leaning against a wall, not ten feet away. Though several people surrounded her, sipping negligently at their wine and laughing, she seemed somehow apart. Tired of it all. Her eyes, which had been resting vacantly on the space over his shoulder, focused on him. They were a penetrating blue, and gave Julian a start. He saw that she was not bored at all, but unhappy.
She looked away.“Sir,” she said evenly, bobbing a shallow curtsy. Something in her tone indicated she’d overheard the tail end of his argument with Frazer. He opened his mouth to respond—after all, the lady had seemed to be waiting for him—but she had already retreated in a swish of cornflower silk, and he was not in the mood for a chase.
He began to wonder about the coincidence when she drifted after him into the garden. Was she following him? In London he might have felt some faint, predatory stirring of interest—he enjoyed women, particularly those who spared him the trouble of pursuit—but he had a policy of avoiding memsahibs. Their husbands were rarely understanding, and they themselves tended to be so bored by life on a British station that passing love affairs quickly inflated to their entire reason for being. There was also an absurd set of ideas circulating about him in Anglo-Indian circles, variations on the theme of exotic Eastern eroticism, and he’d long since grown weary of it.
But she did not, in fact, seem to know he was there. She paused at the edge of the lawn, one hand coming to her throat, and seemed content to stand there, an abstracted look on her face. A breeze came over the grass, and her fingers loosened, letting the shawl flutter around her shoulders. Fleetingly, her pale lips curved in a smile.
Again, he was struck by the impression that she stood at a great remove from the scene around her. Curious. He studied her more closely, finding nothing of special note. Her hair was an unremarkable color, a curling, sun-faded dun that, in conjunction with her pale skin, made it seem as though all the energy of her being were focused in the brilliance of her deep blue eyes. A very odd sort of beauty, if a beauty at all. He wondered if she had recently been ill.
The thought made him impatient with himself. She was young, no more than twenty-two or –three years, with smooth white skin that bespoke a typical memsahib’s routine. What was there to wonder about her? She would spend her days closeted in a bungalow, reading or at needlepoint. When the monotony began to wear, she would take heart in her zealous belief that the English way of life was the only one of merit in the world.
She muttered something beneath her breath. Despite himself, he leaned forward. He could not quite make it out. Surely she had not said—
With a violent gesture, she splashed her wine into the bushes. “Pig swill,” she said clearly.

The garden was not cool, but it was quiet. Emma turned her face into the sultry breeze and let her eyes drift shut. Had Mrs. Greeley been speaking the truth? Either way, the woman must have been surprised at Emma’s impassive reception of the news. It was unpleasant, of course; one didn’t often learn that one’s betrothed was conducting a torrid affair with a married woman. But the act seemed entirely in keeping with the person Marcus had become since their engagement.
Perhaps it was this land that had changed him so. Emma had only been here a few weeks, but she already sensed that India had taken hold of her: loosening her tongue, widening her eyes. Even now, when her mind should have been racing with the implications of Mrs. Greeley’s words, the gentle swaying of the trees and the parrots twittering in the branches above distracted her from thought. The night air mantled her bare shoulders, thick and warm, so richly perfumed with night-blooming jasmine that she wondered if she would carry the scent back inside with her.
A cow lowed in the distance. She felt a brief stirring of pity, imagining he was confused at the excess of liberty granted him by the native culture. As to why the cows were encouraged to wander through the streets, Marcus had told her that the Hindus believed them to be some sort of deity, but he hadn’t been able to elaborate. Marcus was often impatient with details.
This party, for instance. He should have told her, given her some warning regarding the people she would meet. Within five minutes it had become clear that Delhi society was no friend to her, that news of the shipwreck and her “dishonorable” rescue had tainted local opinion. But instead he’d let her march inside like a lamb to the slaughter, encouraging her to mingle with the sharp-tongued harpies whilst he conferred with the Commissioner.
All this, and then to discover he was having an affair with the hostess!
Well, it was clear that whatever they did when alone together, Marcus had not reviewed Mrs. Eversham’s wine list for her. He was possessed of impeccable taste. With a scoff she tossed the remnants of her bordeaux into the shrubbery. “Pig swill!”
The quiet laugh startled her, and she gasped, squinting into the shadows. “Who’s there?”
A form emerged from the trees, offering her a toast from a silver flask. “Pig swill indeed,” he said, and lifted the pocket pistol to his lips for a long swallow.
She relaxed slightly at the Oxford drawl, which complemented a deliciously low, rough voice. “Pray do not relay my sentiments to our hostess, sir.” Or perhaps do, she added silently.
Another step brought him full out of darkness, and she caught her breath. It was the man from indoors—the one whom she had nearly collided with earlier. Once again, his height took her off guard. He was taller even than Marcus, and a full head over her own considerable length. His eyes were a luminescent green-gold, cat-like as they reflected the faint light spilling from the bungalow. They watched her as though he waited for something.
“Are we acquainted?” she blurted out—knowing very well they were not.
He gave her a faint smile. “No.”
When he said nothing more, she arched a brow, returning rude stare for rude stare. At least, she hoped it was rude, for she suspected she might be ogling him. The man was unnervingly handsome—like something from a fever dream, brilliant and fierce, skin touched by gold and hair so black it absorbed the light. Earlier, indoors, she had found herself looking at him, thinking his face begged to be sketched. It would take only a few economical strokes—sharp, angular slashes for the cheekbones, a bold straight line for his nose, a fierce square for his jaw. Perhaps his lips would take more time. They were full and mobile, and saved his countenance from sternness.
He was very tanned. Doubt flickered through her mind, quashed as she considered his starched cravat and elegantly cut tail coat. Of course he was English. The lazy grace with which he held himself made her aware of her own unmannerly slouch. She straightened, lifting her face towards the stars.
“A lovely night,” she said.
“Pleasant weather,” he agreed, eliciting a startled laugh from her.
“You must be joking!” she said, when he tilted his head in question. “It’s dreadfully hot.”
“Do you think so?” He shrugged. “Then I suggest you withdraw to Almora. The hill stations are quite popular this time of year.”
His reference to the tradition of retreating to the Himalayan foothills during the hot weather sounded almost contemptuous. “You don’t plan to go?”
“Business holds me here.”
“Business. You’re with the Company, then?” Most everyone she had met so far was in the employ of the East India Company, either as a civil servant or, like Marcus, as an officer in the army.
But he appeared mightily amused by the idea. “Dear God, no. I see my reputation does not precede me.”
“Oh, is it very bad?” The question was out of her mouth before she could reconsider, and she blushed as he laughed again.
“It’s even worse.”
When she realized he wasn’t going to elaborate, she ventured to continue. “You’ll have to tell me about it yourself; I’ve only just arrived in Delhi, you see.”
“Really?” He sounded surprised. “I didn’t know they raised chits like you in England.”
“Chits like me?” She frowned. He had settled back against a tree trunk and was smiling at her indulgently, as if—suddenly it came to her—she were some three-year-old who had just shown him a neat trick with her doll. “Are you being insulting?”
“I meant you seem to have some spirit.”
“You are being insulting,” she decided. “To me and England both.”
“Well then.” He sighed and rolled his shoulders; his coat fit closely enough to reveal the ripple of arm muscles beneath the fabric. She wondered what he had done to acquire them; it was not at all the fashion. “Now you’ve discovered the first part of my reputation. I am considered terribly ill-mannered.”
“But I knew that the moment I saw you! A gentleman would refrain from drinking spirits in the presence of a lady.”
His brows rose. “And a lady would not call her hostess’s wine—what was it? Pig swill, I believe?”
Her laughter was reluctant, but genuine. “All right, you’ve found me out. I’m a black sheep as well. Really, it’s a wonder my intended will have me.”
“Paragon of virtue, is he?”
“Not quite,” she said dryly. “But they’ll forgive him just about anything.” The conversation was utterly inappropriate, of course; but she had forgotten how good it felt to joke and be silly with someone, and to be spoken to without those ever-present undertones of pity and speculation. “In fact, someone inside just called him the ‘Darling of Delhi.’”
“He sounds dreadfully dull. Do I know him?”
“Oh, you must. This party is in honor of us, you know—of our engagement.” His sudden stillness made her frown, and she searched his face, concerned she might have embarrassed him. “If you don’t know who the party’s for, I promise not to tell.”
“Oh, I know.” His voice was very soft now. “That would make you Miss Martin.”
“Indeed! And now you must tell me your name, so I won’t be at a disadvantage.”
His cat’s eyes moved over her shoulder, and he smiled again, this time rather unpleasantly. “Here comes your betrothed,” he said, and took a deep swig from the flask.
“Emmaline! There you are!”
She turned back towards the doors, shielding her eyes from the light. “Marcus!” He was yanking his cravat in place, and she wondered acidly if he hadn’t been waylaid by their hostess somewhere between the Commissioner and the garden. “I was taking some air,” she said. “Flannel is horribly ill-suited to this climate.”
Marcus stepped into the yard. “I hardly think that’s appropriate for public discussion,” he said severely. “And I did warn you about the weather, but you insisted—” His voice died away as he stared at her companion. “What in blazes are you doing here?”
“Lindley,” the man said curtly. “A pleasure.”
Marcus made a rude noise. “I’m sure I can’t say the same. I had no idea Mrs. Eversham was so indiscriminate with her guest list.”
Emma glanced rapidly between them. The stranger’s expression was perfectly neutral; Marcus, on the other hand, was glaring and breathing like a bull. “Marcus, really! This gentleman—”
“Knows he is not welcome,” Marcus said. “Not anywhere I am, and certainly nowhere near my future wife. I would suggest you leave now, sir.”
The man shrugged. “Of course.” Slipping the flask inside his jacket, he sketched a shallow bow. “Accept my congratulations on your betrothal, Lindley. Miss Martin is utterly charming.”
“You soil her by speaking of her,” Marcus snapped. “Beware lest I call you out for it!”
Now she was truly alarmed. Something about this man—perhaps his slight smile at Marcus’s threat—made her think he would be more than a match for her intended. “Gentlemen, this is absurd!”
“Come with me.” His hand tightening cruelly into her forearm, Marcus all but dragged her back into the bungalow.
Inside, the sudden brightness of numerous lamps and candelabras made her wince. She pulled Marcus to a stop at the edge of the crowd, beneath one of the giant fans hanging from the ceiling. Its starched chintz streamers were wilting in the humidity. “I cannot credit your behavior,” she said. “How could you behave so loutishly!”
“How could I?” Marcus pulled her around to face him. “Do you know who that man is? Do you know?”
“Stop shaking me!” She yanked her arm from his grip. The strong, sour odors of wine and sweat were rising from his skin. Maybe he had overindulged tonight, but that was no excuse. “What has come over you?”
“That is my cousin,” he managed, his face purple. “That is the half-breed who would have the dukedom instead of me.”
“That—” She stopped, understanding. “That man is Julian Sinclair?”
“One and the same.”
She turned away from him, staring blindly toward the dancers. Marcus had written to her of his second cousin, Julian Sinclair. Sinclair’s father Jeremy had married a Eurasian, a woman of mixed English and native descent, when he had thought his brother the Marquess would have the dukedom. But within a short period, the cholera had killed Jeremy, and the Marquess had died in a hunting accident. That left Jeremy’s young son as heir to the dukedom—Julian, whose blood was one-quarter native.
Now Julian Sinclair was grown, and his grandfather, the current duke, had made sure through every legal means that his grandson would follow him in the succession. But Marcus could not accept the idea that a man of mixed blood might inherit the title, when Marcus, pure-blooded English and in line after Sinclair to inherit, might himself wear the strawberry leaves so well.
“He didn’t seem Indian,” she whispered to herself.
“Of course he didn’t!” Marcus exploded. “The Duke has done everything in his power to assure it—Eton, Cambridge, a seat in the Commons. But while a man can ape his betters, he can’t change his blood. The proudest title in Britain is to go to a mongrel!”
She looked back to him, stunned. “Marcus, you sound so… hateful.”
He stared at her, his mouth thinning into a grim line. “Is that so? To think, you’ve only been here for five days, and already you’re starting to pant after the natives. What would your parents say?”
She winced. A servant was passing with a tray of wine; she reached out and snared a glass. “That is cruel.”
“Cruel but true. Even in death, they knew the honor of being Martins.”
She took a deep swallow of the wretched bordeaux and shut her eyes. Again and again it returned to haunt her—this image of her parents’ faces, so small and pale as the ocean closed over them. The pain of their deaths did not fade; most nights, she still awoke weeping from nightmares of drowning with them. Only a miracle had guided her to the gig on which she had floated for almost a day; only God had given her the strength to cling to it as the hot sun beat down and she despaired of ever being found.
She set the glass on a sideboard and looked directly at him. The atmosphere was close and torpid, and sweat was trickling down her nape; strange, then, that she felt so cold. “You think it would have been more honorable to let myself drown?”
After a mute, stubborn moment, his face softened, and he reached for her hands. “No, my dear, of course not.”
But she wondered. After all, he could play with his precious honor all he liked, risking it with his conspicuous philandering, his exorbitant gambling debts. But to have that honor tarnished by a woman! Surely it must irk him, to risk being made a laughing-stock by upholding a betrothal with a woman of questionable reputation—a woman who had arrived in India sheltered not under the watchful gaze of her mother and father, but by a crew of rough-and-ready sailors. Those sailors had saved her life, but Anglo-Indian society was wondering if they hadn’t robbed her of something even more important: her virtue.
Naturally, the fact that her betrothed’s virtue was completely and publicly compromised was of no import at all.
She lifted her chin. “Oh, I was only speaking with him, Marcus. Do let’s forget it. There’s no need to look so grim.”
Marcus exhaled. His eyes began to search the crowd beyond her shoulder. “I’m wondering why he hasn’t been thrown out by now.”
“Perhaps because he’s the Marquess of Holdensmoor?”
He slanted her a sharp glance. “I’m not in the mood for your cheek, Emmaline. And for your information, the man’s a threat to the Crown. He’s been stirring up talk of a possible insurrection, trying to goad us into abandoning Delhi. Thinks our native troops might turn on us.”
“Gracious! Might they?”
He waved a dismissal. “It’s treason to even think it. No, of course they won’t. We give them the bread their families eat in the morning. Just because of some silly nonsense at Barrackpore—”
Yes, she remembered that. It had been all the talk in Bombay upon her arrival in the port city. A sepoy, a native soldier, had turned on his British officers. He had shot two of them before he was stopped by his superiors; what had been so alarming, if she recalled correctly, was that none of the other natives had attempted to disarm him.
“He does have a point,” she said. “It’s a bit alarming.”
“It was one isolated incident in over two hundred years on this continent. And the man was directly hanged. We’ll have no more trouble along those lines, I assure you.”
“But if Lord Holdensmoor is partly native, perhaps he has heard something—”
“Emmaline!” Marcus wheeled to face her. “Yes, the man is part native, and for all I know, he’s trying to scare us out of Delhi so the natives can take it back! In fact, I believe that is exactly what he is up to, and I have told the Commissioner so! Now cease your ignorant speculations and make yourself pleasant for your host.”
“My host? Do you mean the one you’re cuckolding?”
All color bleached from his face. Oh dear. Blonde hair didn’t look so well on skin that particular shade of green. “What did you just say?” he asked.
“So it’s true.” Nausea rolled through her stomach. “Well. I suppose you’re going to tell me you still love me anyhow.”
His eyes, such a guileless shade of blue, searched her face. “Of course I do.”
She managed a smile. “Yes. We have loved each other quite a long time, haven’t we? Since we were born, I believe.”
“Since forever,” he said, with an admirable show of sincerity. “And whatever rumors you hear to the contrary, there is no woman in the world for me but you. Some people are jealous, you see, and they would spread vicious gossip in order to harm me—”
“I know,” she interrupted, and then stopped, swallowing hard when her voice would have broken. How sad to realize that she could no longer believe a word he said. “Marcus, I think I’d like to leave now.”
He considered her for a moment, then gave a short nod. “Of course. But I will call on you at the Residency tomorrow. We’ll discuss this, and you’ll see, my dear. These lies—you must simply set them from your mind.”
“Naturally,” she murmured. “If you’ll find Lady Metcalfe for me?”
She leaned back against the wall, watching him push his way through the congratulatory crowd as he went in search of her chaperone. Even though his back was turned, she knew every gesture that he made, sensed every smile that crossed his face. Such was the familiarity of twenty long years—decades of their families plotting to bring them together, arranging their betrothal, choosing the names of their unborn children. The Martins and Lindleys had never known that the only two who would live to fulfill their dream would be the very two who had never been quite as enthusiastic as the rest: the bride and groom themselves.
She closed her eyes, turning her head to press her cheek against the cool bungalow wall. The windows rattled in a strong gust of hot wind, and the candles flickered with the inrush of jasmine and darkness. Strange, how the night called to her so sweetly, promising a lovelier, more innocent place. Yes, India seemed to draw out her very soul. Perhaps that was why she felt so bruised inside—as though her defenses had been laid bare, allowing a terrible melancholy to settle in her core.
Surely she wasn’t grieving over Marcus? She had abandoned her childish dreams of romantic love three years ago, the first time she’d learned of one of his many paramours. She’d been heartbroken then, but her mother had explained quickly enough: marriage was not about something as illusory and fleeting as love. It was about alliances, partnerships, the continuation of the family line. Marcus’s grand and crumbling estates would be consolidated with the vast Martin wealth, and the two of them would create a dynasty that would compensate for her mother’s failure to produce male issue.
So what, then, could account for this sudden foreboding? It slid like a shadow between her and the brightly lit room, leaving her with the odd conviction that she stood apart, watching a great panorama like those they sometimes displayed in the British Museum. This room seemed like Pompeii before the volcano eruption, or Rome before the fall: a civilization on the edge of disaster.
A shiver slid over her, and she glanced away, starting as she found herself locked in a vibrant emerald gaze: Lord Holdensmoor, coming in from the gardens. His face was expressionless as he stared at her. In defiance of both Marcus and her own gloomy reverie, she offered him a smile.
His own was rakish and swift, the effect of it on his aloof, aristocratic features dazzling to behold. And then he too was gone, his tall, broad form swallowed up by the crowd in a cloud of crushed silk and waving peacock feather fans.

DC: Is there a genre you haven’t tackled but would like to try?

MD: I’m an avid reader of YA, paranormal romance, historical fiction, SF/F, and urban fantasy. I have ideas for books in all of these genres. Time is what I lack!

DC: What advice would you give to your younger self?

MD: Relax. There’s always time for a walk in the sunshine.

DC: You have listed on your site you’re currently reading Nalini Singh’s Branded by Fire. I have to say I loved this book, it’s the best of the series for me. How did you like it? Give us some of your thoughts about it?

MD: I just updated that yesterday! I’m a huge of Nalini Singh. I’ve just started reading the book, so I can’t say much, save that it’s fantastic so far. Oh, also: it takes serious talent to write a sex scene in the first chapter, before we’ve gotten a chance to fully invest in the characters, and make it so incredibly riveting.

DC: If you were a book, what would your blurb be?

MD: Gosh, great question. Well, blurbs are meant to sell the product, so I’ll abandon modesty for this exercise. Perhaps something like, “Fast-paced intensity, interspersed with moments of wicked humor and whimsical reverie.”

DC: Your next book has just received its title, Wicked Becomes You, and is due out in May of next year. May we get a sneak peek?

MD: Sure! Here’s the working copy:

She’s been burned not once but twice by London’s so-called gentlemen . . .

Gwen Maudsley is pretty enough to be popular, and plenty wealthy, too. But what she’s best known and loved for is being so very, very nice. When a cad jilts her at the altar—again—the scandal has her outraged friends braying for blood. Only Gwen has a different plan. If nice no longer works for her, then it’s time to learn to be naughty. Happily, she knows the perfect tutor—

Alexander Ramsey, her late brother’s best friend and a notorious rogue.

So why won’t a confirmed scoundrel let her be as bad as she wants to be?
Unbeknownst to Gwen, Alex’s aloof demeanor veils his deepest unspoken desire. He has no wish to see her change, nor to tempt himself with her presence when his own secrets make any future between them impossible. But on a wild romp from Paris to the Riviera, their friendship gives way to something hotter, darker, and altogether more dangerous. With Alex’s past and Gwen’s newly unleashed wildness on a collision course, Gwen must convince Alex that his wickedest intentions are exactly what she needs.

DC: What would be your “voice’s” tagline?

MD: Hmm. Okay, I was blushing for days over something the Book Smugglers said about Bound by Your Touch – Ana called it “sophisticated, beautifully written and utterly romantic.” I’d like to imagine this applies to my voice!

DC: If you had never become an author, what do you think you would be doing right now?

MD: Well, I’m a PhD student in anthropology, so I hope to be an anthropologist as well as a novelist. Were it not for the fiction writing, I’d still be aiming at a professorship.

DC: What else is on the horizon for Meredith Duran?

MD: I’m off to India for a year to do anthropological research! The laptop, of course, comes with me.

Lightning Round:

- dark or milk chocolate?     – Dark.
- smooth or chunky peanut butter?     – Chunky.
- heels or flats?   – Both.
- coffee or tea?    – Coffee.
- summer or winter?   – Summer, for the sunlight – not for the heat!
- mountains or beach?   – Mountains.
- mustard or mayonnaise?    – Mix them together!
- flowers or candy?    – Candy.
- pockets or purse?    – Pockets.
- Pepsi or Coke?   – Coke.
- ebook or print?     – Until I get an e-reader, print all the way.

And because they’re still amusing:

1. What is your favorite word?    – kerfuffle
2. What is your least favorite word?     – Glint.
3. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?    – Reading amazing fiction. Mountains that slope down to the ocean. London. Airports and hotel lobbies, spaces that encode the possibility of encountering the unexpected.
4. What turns you off creatively, spiritually or emotionally?    – Anxiety. Traffic. The glare of the sun off concrete and high-rise windows. Really, really hot weather.
5. What sound or noise do you love?     – Fiddle music. The ocean at night. The sound a dog makes when he sighs through his nose. The scratch of a fountain pen across textured paper.
6. What sound or noise do you hate?     – The squealing of brakes and microphones. The high-pitched, almost-but-not-quite-undetectable hum of electronic equipment. Alarm clocks.
7. What is your favorite curse word?     – Erm. In my mother’s presence? “Crap.” Since she’ll probably google me and find this interview, I’ll leave it at that!
8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?   – In another life, I’d love to work for the foreign service. Learning languages is such fun. The opportunity to live in so many places overseas, to settle down and really get to know those places, and also to find a support network wherever you land — all of that sounds fantastic.
9. What profession would you not like to do?    – I would make a very bad chemist. In high school, titration always slayed me.
10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?    – “Good job. The library is that way, between the pizza parlor and the puppy playpen. Get to it!”

DC: Meredith, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today!

Glad you’re all here with us for our Duck Chat!

Sherry Thomas is our guest today. If you have been to Sherry’s website to read about her incredible journey through life that eventually led her to becoming an author, you should hightail it over there. The short version is Sherry came to the United States from China at age 13; therefore, her first language is not English, but she did what was necessary and now Sherry gives readers like you and me beautiful romances to read. A motivating story like so few others.

Sherry’s first book was Private Arrangements, which released in March of last year, and was followed by Delicious in July. Both books have won awards and fans can’t get enough of them. Get ready for a fun day with Sherry! Be sure to ask questions or leave a comment because she is giving away a couple of copies of her latest release, Not Quite a Husband. Now let’s chat!

DUCK CHAT: Sherry, after reading about you on your website, I have to give you kudos on your commitment and dedication in learning the English language once you got to the United States at the age of 13. What a terrific story and it’s hopefully incentive for other people, no matter what they choose to do in life. Were there other similar obstacles you had to overcome on your way to discovering you’d like to write?

SHERRY THOMAS: Hmm, I would say the other obstacle was the belief that writing is not any kind of proper career. I come from a family of scientists and engineers. My mom especially is as practical a person as they come–she is still very much surprised that I’m an author.

So I don’t think I would ever have pursued writing if I hadn’t found myself a stay-at-home mom at a very young age, all my other plans put aside while I looked after my new baby. It was one of those things where I went, oh well, I don’t have any other career prospects now, so why the heck not? *g*

DC: If you could retire any question and never, ever have it asked again, what would it be? Feel free to answer it.

st: LOL. I think it is far too early in my career for me to have same-question fatigue yet. I’m happy and grateful to answer questions, even if I’ve answered similar questions before. I never copy and paste answers as I’m a different me every day and even similar questions get different answers depending on when they come to me.

DC: I hear you like playing computer games with your sons. What’s your favorite game? Do you let your sons win? Or are they a take-no-prisoners players and you have to be on your toes all the time?

ST: My favorite games are the Wonderland series and the Mystery Case Files series—both casual games, as we don’t really have game consoles at home. Wonderland is the cutest game ever, with these adorable characters and their equally adorable foes in adorable adventure-puzzle boards that you need to solve. My sons do the more action-y parts and I do the more think-y parts.

Mystery Case Files games started as a fairly straightforward hidden-object game—like I Spy. But it has since evolved to include ever more puzzle elements. Their latest installment, Return to Ravenhearst, is an absolute masterpiece of game design. I can’t rave enough about it.

None of these are head-to-head games so we play collaboratively, my sons and I. But on hidden-object games, I often hold back and let them find more of the items. I figured it wouldn’t be fun if I were playing with my mother, and she’s locating everything!

DC: I’ve heard writers often say their stories take them in surprising directions, or dialogue flows from some unknown place. Is it the same with you? Do your characters surprise you sometimes?

ST: I can’t really say my stories come from an unknown place. LOL, they come from my head and I’d like to think I am somewhat familiar with that particular place. The stories I write are the stories I’d like to read. They cater very closely to my personal tastes so it is highly unlikely that I am going to suddenly discover that I’m writing a ménage story or a tale of forbidden love between a werewolf and a wererabbit.

What does surprise me is how much I can improve a story, when my editor is standing behind me with a whip. My particular weakness as a writer is that I like the stuff I write—no tormented artist here. But my editor is very, very strict. She edits hard. I moan and wail. But my belief is that as a writer, you never explain yourself to a reader and hope they’ll like your books better as a result. If they’ve read it and they don’t care for it, either it is not to their taste or you’ve failed in your job.

Since my books are to my editor’s taste, or so she assures me every time after she tears a draft apart, I go back to the drawing board and reassess how I can do it better. And every single time, without fail, I end up with a vastly superior draft from the one I started with.

DC: Do you ever argue with your characters while you’re writing? Who usually wins?

ST: No, never. They do what I say. Whom do you think I whip when my editor whips me? *eg*

DC: There’s a quote on your website I found interesting, “when she is not writing, she thinks about the zen and zaniness of her profession…” I think our readers will be curious about this. Can you share a few of those thoughts with us?

ST: Writing is a profession that is tough on the ego, because there is no such thing as a book done exactly right. There is no objective standard. Every book that is loved is also hated. Every book that has passionate detractors will also have passionate defenders. And everyday people bemoan the presence of certain books on the bestseller list and the absence of certain other books.

So I think about how to maintain my inner equilibrium. How do I deal with both praise and criticism directed at my own books? How do I look at my numbers and neither despair—it is soooooo much less than so-and-so’s—nor gloat—it is still better than so-and-so’s? How do I stayed focused on the work rather than the peripherals of the work?

I wouldn’t say it is a daily struggle—I’m far too absent-minded for it. But it is an ongoing process to find the zen zone and then to stay there.

DC: What is sure to distract you from sitting down and working/writing?

ST: This blog and others like it. I have chronic and incurable blog-itis.

DC: How do you feel your male or female characters have evolved so far in your career? Do you think you write them differently now than you did when you started?

ST: When I first started writing, I had no idea at all what either character or characterization meant—I never had any creative writing or even plain old English classes in college. I remember working on my second heroine—in a space-opera story—and thinking to myself, no, she can’t be ruthless, because the heroine from my first story is ruthless, they’ll be exactly the same if they are both ruthless.

And mind you, that was after I’d finished a full manuscript already.

What set me on the road to truly understanding characters is Judith Ivory’s book Beast. Now I’m amazed that I started to write before I’d ever read her because she is such a seminal influence in my evolution as a writer. Not to be hyperbolic, but until I read Beast, I didn’t quite understand human nature. Didn’t understand how a person could contain so many contradictions and still be a working whole. Or how even with all our imperfections, we can still rise above.

DC: Let’s talk about Not Quite a Husband, which was released May 19. First, where did the idea for the story come from? Is it relatively the same book now as it was when you started it?

The germ of the idea came from the movie The Painted Veil, which is about a terribly estranged couple caught in a dangerous place (interior China) at a dangerous time (1920s). The movie was marvelous, except for SPOILER the death of the hero END SPOILER at the end. I felt so awful afterward that I just had to write about a terribly estranged couple caught in a dangerous place at a dangerous time.

My dangerously place turned out to be the North-West Frontier of British India in 1897, with the hero and the heroine encountering an uprising in the Swat Valley. Sound familiar? History does repeat itself, alas.

It is very much not the same book as when I started, because as usual, after my editor went through with it, I rewrote most of everything. And I couldn’t be more grateful that she pushed me for the changes, because the book ended up much better.

DC: Please tell us about Leo and Bryony.

ST: They are a mismatched couple. She is older than him by four years. He is vastly popular. She avoids society like the plague. He is multi-talented. She is good at only one thing, medicine. He understands himself. She doesn’t, at all.

But such is love, is it not, that it can forge connections that entirely baffle outsiders? *g*

Extra special treat, excerpt from Not Quite a Husband:

Prologue

In the course of her long and illustrious career, Bryony Asquith was the subject of numerous newspaper and magazine articles, almost all of which described her appearance as “distinguished and unique, characterized by a dramatic streak of white in her midnight-dark hair.”

The more inquisitive reporters often demanded to know how the white streak came about. She always smiled and briefly recounted a period of criminal overwork in her twenties. “It was the result of not sleeping for days on end. My poor maid, she was quite shocked.”

Bryony Asquith had indeed been in her twenties when it happened. She had indeed been working too much. And her maid had indeed been quite shocked. But as with any substantial lie, there was an important omission: in this case, a man.

His name was Quentin Leonidas Marsden. She’d known him all of her life but never gave him a thought before he returned to London in the spring of 1893. Within seven weeks of meeting him again, she proposed. Another three months and they were married.

From the very beginning they were considered an unlikely pair. He was the handsomest, wildest, and most accomplished of the five handsome, wild, and accomplished Marsden brothers. By the time of their wedding, at age twenty-four, he’d had a paper read at the London Mathematical Society, a play staged at St. James’s Theatre, and a Greenland expedition under his belt.

He was witty, he was popular, he was universally admired. She, on the other hand, spoke very little, was not in demand, and was admired only in very limited circles. In fact, most of Society disapproved of her occupation—and the fact that she had an occupation at all. For a gentleman’s daughter to pursue a medical training and then to go to work every day—every day, as if she were some common clerk—was it really necessary?

There were other unlikely marriages that defied all naysayers and prospered. Theirs, however, failed miserably. For her, that was; she’d been the miserable one. He seemed scarcely affected. He had a second paper read at the mathematical society; he was more lauded than ever.

By their first anniversary things had quite deteriorated. She’d barred the door to her bedchamber and he, well, he did not wallow in celibacy. They no longer dined together. They no longer even spoke when they occasionally came upon each other.

They might have carried on in that state for decades but for something he said—and not to her.

It was a summer evening, some four months after she first denied him his marital rights. She’d returned home rather earlier than usual, before the stroke of midnight, because she’d been awake for seventy hours—a small-scale outbreak of dysentery and a spate of strange rashes had her at her microscope in the laboratory when she wasn’t seeing to patients.

She paid the cabbie and stood a moment outside her house, head up, the palm of her free hand held out to feel for raindrops. The night air smelled of the tang of electricity. Already thunder rumbled. The periphery of the sky lit every few seconds, truant angels playing with matches.

When she lowered her face Leo was there, regarding her coolly.

He took her breath away in the most literal sense: she was too asphyxiated for her lungs to expand and contract properly. He aroused every last ounce of covetousness in her—and there was so much of it in her, hidden in the tenebrous recesses of her heart.

Had they been alone they’d have nodded and walked past each other without a word. But Leo had a friend with him, a loquacious chap named Wessex who liked to practice gallantry on Bryony, even though gallantry had about as much effect on her as vaccine injections on a corpse.

They’d been having excellent luck at the tables, Wessex informed her, while Leo smoothed every finger of his gloves with the fastidiousness of a deranged valet. She stared at his gloved hands, her insides leaden, her heart ruined.

“…awfully clever, the way you phrased it. How exactly did you say it, Marsden?” asked Wessex.

“I said a good gambler approaches the table with a plan,” answered Leo, his voice impatient. “And an inferior gambler with a desperate prayer and much blind hope.”

It was as if she’d been dropped from a great height. Suddenly she understood her own action all too well. She’d been gambling. And their marriage was the bet on which she’d staked everything. Because if he loved her, it would make her as beautiful, desirable, and adored as he. And it would prove everyone who never loved her definitively wrong.

“Precisely,” Wessex exclaimed. “Precisely.”

“We should leave Mrs. Marsden to her repose now, Wessex,” said Leo. “No doubt she is exhausted after a long day at her noble calling.”

She glanced sharply at him. He looked up from his gloves. Even in such poor soggy light, he remained the epitome of magnetism and glamour. The spell he cast over her was complete and unbreakable.

When he returned to London, everyone and her maid had been in love with him.

He should have had the decency to laugh at Bryony, and tell her that an old-maid physician, no matter the size of her inheritance, had no business proposing to Apollo himself. He should not have given her that half smile and said, “Go on. I’m listening.”

“Good night, Mr. Wessex,” she said. “Good night, Mr. Marsden.”

Two hours later, as the storm shook the shutters, she lay in her bed shivering—she’d sat in the bath too long, until the water had chilled to the temperature of the night.

Leo, she thought, as she did every night. Leo. Leo. Leo.

She bolted upright. She’d never realized it before, but this mantra of his name was her desperate prayer, her blind hopes condensed into a single syllable. When had mere covetousness descended into obsession? When had he become her opium, her morphia?

There were many things she could tolerate—the world was full of scorned wives who went about their day with their heads held high. But she could not tolerate such pitiable needs in herself. She would not be as those wretches she’d witnessed at work, wild for the love of their poison, tenderly fueling their addiction even as it robbed them of every last dignity.

He was her poison. He was that for whom she abandoned sense and judgment. For the lack of whom she suffered like a maltreated puppy, shaking and whimpering in the dead of the night. Already her soul withered, diminishing into little more than this vampiric craving.

But how could she free herself from him? They were married—only a year ago, in a lavish affair for which she’d spared no expenses, because she wanted the whole world to know that she was the one he’d chosen, above all others.

Thunder boomed as if an artillery battle raged in the streets outside. Inside the house everything was silent and still. Not a single creak came from the stairs or the chamber that adjoined hers—she never heard any sounds from him anymore. The darkness smothered her.

She shook her head. If she didn’t think about it—if she worked until she was exhausted every day—she could pretend that her marriage wasn’t a complete disaster.

But it was. A complete disaster.

One small lie—This marriage has never been consummated—would free them both.

Then she could walk away from him, from the wreckage of the greatest and only gamble of her life. Then she could forget that she’d been mired in an unrequited love as unwholesome as any malarial swamp on the Subcontinent. Then she could breathe again.

No, she couldn’t. She could never leave him. When he smiled at her, she walked on rose petals. The one time she’d allowed him to kiss her, for days afterward everything had tasted of milk and honey.

If she asked for and received an annulment, he would marry someone else, and she would be his wife and the mother of his children, not Bryony, forgotten and unlamented.

She did not want him to forget her. She would endure anything to hold on to him.

She could not stand this desperate, sniveling creature she’d become.

She loved him.

She hated both him and herself.

She hugged her shoulders tight, rocked back and forth, and stared into shadows that would not dispel.

She was still sitting up in bed, her arms wrapped around her knees, rocking and staring, when her maid came in the morning. Molly went about the room, opening curtains and shutters, letting in the day.

She poured Bryony’s tea, approached the bed, and dropped the tray. Something shattered loudly.

“Oh, missus. Your hair. Your hair!”

Bryony looked up dumbly. Molly rushed about the room and returned with a hand mirror. “Look, missus. Look.”

Bryony thought she looked almost tolerable for someone who hadn’t slept in three days. Then she saw the streak in her hair, two inches wide and white as washing soda.

The mirror fell from her hands.

“I’ll get some nitrate of silver and make a dye,” Molly said. “No one will even notice.”

“No, no nitrate of silver,” Bryony said mechanically. “It’s harmful.”

“Some sulphate of iron then. Or I could mix henna with some ammonia, but I don’t know if that will be—”

“Yes, you may go prepare it,” said Bryony.

When Molly was gone she picked up the mirror again. She looked strange and strangely vulnerable—the desolation she’d kept carefully hidden made manifest by the translucent fragility of her white hair. And she had no one to blame. She’d done this to herself, with her relentless need, her delusions, her willingness to gamble it all for a mythical fulfillment conjured by her fevered mind.

She set aside the mirror, wrapped her arms about her knees, and resumed her rocking—she had a few minutes before Molly rushed back with the hair dye, before she must arrange a meeting with him to calmly and rationally discuss the dissolution of their marriage.

Leo, she permitted herself this one last indulgence, a widow at her husband’s grave, sobbing his name in vain. Leo. Leo. Leo.

It wasn’t supposed to end this way, Leo. It wasn’t supposed to end this way.
Chapter One
Kalash Valleys
Near Chitral, Northwest Frontier, India
1897

The white streak was a gash of barrenness against the rich deep black of her hair. It started at the edge of her forehead, just to the right of center, swept straight down the back of her head, and twisted through her chignon in a striking—and eerie—arabesque.

It invoked an odd reaction in him. Not pity; he would no more pity her than he would pity the lone Himalayan wolf. And not affection; she’d put an end to that with her frigidity, in heart and body. An echo of some sort then, memories of old hopes from more innocent days.

She’d finished washing her hands minutes ago, but she hadn’t moved from the edge of the stream. Instead she’d picked up a twig to traced random patterns in the swift-flowing, aquamarine water.

Beyond the stream fields of wheat glinted a thick, bright green in the narrow alluvial plain. Small, rectangular houses of wood and stacked stone piled one on top of another, like a collection of weathered playing blocks. Behind the village, the ground rose quickly, a brief stratum of walnut and fruit trees before the slope butted up against austere crags that supported only dots of shrubs and an intrepid deodar or two.

“Bryony,” he said at last—he wasn’t sure how much longer he could remain standing.

She went still. The twig washed downstream, caught in a rock, then spun and floated free again.

So she hadn’t known that he was there. With her it was sometimes hard to tell. She was capable of a surpassing obliviousness. But he did not put it past her to deliberately ignore him in public. It had happened before.

She picked up the rubber gloves she’d worn during the caesarean section and began to wash the blood from them. “Mr.Marsden, how unexpected. What brings you to this part of the world?”

“Your father is ill. Your sister sent several cables to Leh, and when she received no response from you, she asked me to find you.”

She was still again. “What’s the matter with my father?”

“I don’t know the specifics. Lady Callista only said that doctors are not hopeful and that he wishes to see you.”

She rose and turned around at last.

At first glance, her face gave the impression of great tranquility and sweetness. Then one noticed the bleakness behind her eyes, as if she were a nun on the verge of losing her faith. When she spoke, however, all illusions of meek melancholy fled, for she had the most leave-me-alone voice he’d ever heard, not strident but stridently self-sufficient, and little concerned with anything that did not involve diseased flesh.

But she was silent this moment and reminded him of a churchyard stone angel that watched over the departed with a gentle, steady compassion.

“You believe Callista?” she asked, destroying the semblance.

“I shouldn’t?”

She shook droplets of water from the gloves. “Unless you were dying in the autumn of ’95.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“She claimed you were. She said you were somewhere in the wastes of America, dying, and desperately wanted to see me one last time.”

“I see,” he said. “Does she make a habit of it?”

“Are you engaged to be married?”

“No,” he said. Though he should be. He knew a number of beautiful, affectionate young women, any one of whom would make him a warm, delightful spouse.

“According to her you are. And would gladly jilt the poor girl if I but give the command.” She did not look at him as she said this last, her eyes on the gloves, which she patted dry with a cloth. “I’m sorry that she dragged you into her schemes. And I’m much obliged to you for coming out this far—”

“But you’d rather I turned around and went back right away?”

Silence. “No, of course not. You’ll need to rest and re-provision.”

“And if I didn’t need to rest or re-provision?”

She did not answer, but bent down to stow the gloves and the drying cloth in her bag.

Weeks upon weeks of trekking across some of the most inhospitable terrains on Earth, sleeping on hard ground, eating what he could shoot and the occasional handful of wild berries, so he wouldn’t be weighed down by a train of coolies carrying the usual necessities deemed indispensable for a sahib’s travels—and this was her response.

One should never expect anything else from her.

“Even the boy who cried wolf was right about the wolf once,” he said. “Your father is more than sixty years old. Is it so unlikely for a man of his age to ail?”

She tightened the straps of her bag and buckled it shut. “It would be four months to go from here to England and back, on the off-chance that Callista might be telling the truth.”

“And if she is, you will regret not having gone.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

Her ambivalence toward most of Creation had once fascinated him. He’d thought her complicated and extraordinary. But no, she was merely cold and unfeeling.

“Chitral is one march away,” he said. “We can reach it tomorrow. We’ll need a day or two there for provision and coolies. Then we can start for Peshawar.”

She looked back at him, her expression unyielding. “I did not say I’d come.”

It was 370 miles from Gilgit, where he’d been peacefully minding his own business, to Leh, that much again back to Gilgit, then 220 miles from Gilgit to Chitral. For most of the way he’d done two marches a day, sometimes three. He’d lost a full stone in weight. And he hadn’t been this tired since Greenland.

Fuck you.

“Suit yourself,” he said. “I’m leaving in the morning.”

DC: Is there a genre you haven’t tackled but would like to try?

ST: I tackle everything I like. So there are very few things that I like and haven’t tackled, but there are tons of things I’ve tried but haven’t finished. Somewhere on my hard-drive there are three science fiction romance partials, a two-thirds-there screenplay, a martial-art epic, and a Star Wars novel.

I also have an in-the-home-stretch contemporary romance that I call my waiting-for-Caitlin book. Caitlin is my editor. Whenever I’m waiting on her to get back to me about something, that’s the book I work on. I’m determined to finish it this year, right after I finished the current historical work-in-progress.

DC: What advice would you give to your younger self?

ST: To not have waited so long to chuck the “after I get published” rider. What I mean is that for a long time I used to postpone the rest of my life by saying I’ll do (insert heart’s desire) after I get published. LOL, now I’m published and I never do anything but type—I am a slow writer so deadlines, no matter how far out, are always breathing down my neck. I really should have lived it up back then!

DC: You have some terrific information about and pics of British India, where Not Quite a Husband takes place, on your website. Has that inspired a yearning in you to see it firsthand yourself?

ST: I have been to India—my husband is Indian—but not anywhere close to the foot of the Himalayas, where most of Not Quite a Husband takes place. I would love to see that part of the world, so incredibly rugged and beautiful. And ride the bus that rattles the whole length of the Korakoram Highway from Peshawar all the way to Kashgar in the very far west of China.

But only after the troubles die down and peace and prosperity return. And even then my mother might not let me!

DC: If you had never become an author, what do you think you would be doing right now?

ST: I have no idea what I would be doing now, but I do know that I would have liked to become a diplomat. Not that I have any particular finesse or international negotiation skills, but I love wearing cocktail dresses and I love eating hors d’oeuvres. Embassy parties, anyone?

Actually, you know what? I should have been an ambassador’s wife. Then I can write all day, and eat hors d’oeuvres in my cocktail dress all night!

DC: What’s next for Sherry Thomas?

ST: What is next for Sherry Thomas is certain humiliation. I’ve been telling people left and right that I am writing my own version of Loretta Chase’s Mr. Impossible, except without anything to do with Egypt. Well, guess what? I finally got around to re-reading Mr. Impossible and that book is pretty much perfect. I might as well have said I’m writing my own Hamlet, lol.

On the other hand, reading Mr. Impossible makes me impossibly happy. I love it when a romance really is all that.

Lightning Round:

- dark or milk chocolate? – Mild dark chocolate. I used to think I loved dark chocolate until I had the70%-pure sort. I totally cried uncle and ran back to milk chocolate for a while.
- smooth or chunky peanut butter? – Smooth.
- heels or flats? – Flats for everyday. Heels for RWA Nationals.
- coffee or tea? – Tea.
- summer or winter? – Spring and autumn.
- mountains or beach? – Mountains that rise from the ocean, beach optional.
- mustard or mayonnaise? – Mayonnaise. I was once gently escorted away from the salad bar in my high school’s cafeteria because I was loading my burger with so much mayonnaise.
- flowers or candy? – Cake.
- pockets or purse? – Pockets.
- Pepsi or Coke? – Italian soda.
- ebook or print? – Print, but only because I will not be able to keep track of an e-reader.

And because they’re still fun:

1. What is your favorite word?    – “Totally”
2. What is your least favorite word?    – “Vagina,” followed closely by “penis.”
3. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?     – Peace of mind.
4. What turns you off creatively, spiritually or emotionally?  – Lack of peace of mind.
5. What sound or noise do you love?    – Rain.
6. What sound or noise do you hate?     -  Metal scraping against anything.
7. What is your favorite curse word?    – “Crap!”
8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?    -  Advertising copywriter.
9. What profession would you not like to do?   – Prostitution of any kind, literal or figurative.
10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?   -  “Fresh hors d’oeuvres inside!” Or, if nobody ever eats in Heaven, then maybe, “Well done, my young Padawan.”

DC:  Sherry, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today!

Aural Pleasures 103 – “What” Audio Books are Recommended

In Aural Pleasures 101, we looked at the “Why” and “Where” to buy audio books. In Aural Pleasures 102, we shared advice on “How” to select audio books. So now, for the “What” to buy. Here are a few of my recommendations (audio sample links provided when available, click the cover pics to go to each book’s Amazon page):

Within the Romance genre, most narrators will be female, so I highly recommend that Aural Pleasure novices who are also historical romance fans start with The Indiscretion by Judith Ivory (click to sample Audible.com audio), narrated by Barbara Rosenblat (pictured at right). This Victorian era “lady and the cowboy” story would be a light, enjoyable read on its own, but Rosenblat elevates it by breathing life into Liddy and Sam. She narrates the book in a nondescript American accent, then gives Liddy an upper class British accent that is somehow filled with humor, vulnerability, and playfulness. And the fact that a woman is doing Sam’s voice was lost to me in seconds because his mumbly Texas drawl IS Sam. I think I smiled through most of this audio book. What a JOY this was to listen to! But to illustrate the points I made in Aural Pleasures 102, Rosenblat is also the narrator for Katie MacAlister’s Light My Fire (Aisling Grey series). Even though I ADORED her in The Indiscretion, I listened to the sample and I just don’t think her voice “fits” the MacAlister series as well (could I request that all you rabid Rosenblat fans PLEASE throw only soft objects at me?)

For multiple eargasms, pick up The Highlander series by Karen Marie Moning, narrated by Phil Gigante. So far, the first three have been released – Beyond the Highland Mist (click for sample), To Tame a Highland Warrior (click for sample), and The Highlander’s Touch (Nov 20, 2007)- with the rest apparently to be released in sequence at two month intervals. Phil Gigante does such a good job with the female voices that I was quickly no longer aware that the narrator was a man. And what he does for the male voices… *shiver*… his different Scottish brogues gave me aural eargasm after eargasm! What an amazing talent Gigante is! My only caveat is that I seem to hit the back track button A LOT when listening to Gigante’s narration. Oh, it’s not HIS fault. Well, not really. It’s just that sometimes I get so swept away by HOW his swoonworthy character voices sound, that I forget to pay attention to WHAT they’re saying! (FYI: Phil Gigante is also the narrator for the first book in Nora Roberts’ new Sign of Seven Trilogy, Blood Brothers)

The last three books in Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire series (Sookie Stackhouse) are narrated by Johanna Parker: Book 5, Dead as a Doornail (click for sample), Book 6, Definitely Dead (click for sample), and Book 7, All Together Dead (click for sample). This is a series that I initially didn’t care for because it moved too slow for me in print form. But now I can’t wait for each new release because Johanna Parker brings Sookie Stackhouse to Southern Fried life! I find myself stopping and just floating along with her smooth, small town Louisiana drawl filled with Sookie’s vulnerability and strength. Then she changes not only the pitch and tone, but also the cadence of her narration to bring all the characters in Sookie’s world to life. I notice that Book 1, Dead Until Dark (click for sample), has recently been released in audio, so I hope that bodes well for the release of all the earlier books in audio format, too.

As with the Harris’ series, I never quite heard the voice of Queen Betsy right in my head. The heroine of MaryJanice Davidson’s Undead series came across as a shallow bit of fluff to me. But thanks to narrator Nancy Wu I realized that Betsy’s irreverent snark is not to be missed (and wait till you hear Tina). All six books are available through Audible.com (click to sample).

I mentioned in Aural Pleasures 102 that “since an audio book forces the listener to slow down and read at the narrator’s pace, you will almost always discover things you never noticed before or see scenes in a different light when listening to a favorite book in audio format.” I have found that, even after multiple readings of Laurell K. Hamilton’s Merry Gentry series and Karen Marie Moning’s Fever series, I ALWAYS have new insights after listening to the audio books.

    Brilliance Audio produces Hamilton’s Merry Gentry series, and the narrator, Laural Merlington, does a heroic job of creating distinctive voices for all the characters. I particularly love the hint of Irish brogue she injects into Doyle’s voice. I’ve read the books multiple times, but I NEVER fail to catch something new every time I listen to the audio books. (click to sample Brilliance Audio)

Brilliance also produces Moning’s Fever series audio, narrated by Joyce Bean who, to my ears, has a voice a bit too mature for our heroine. And DOH! Why was I so discombobulated with her Southern accent? Mac IS Southern, yet I never heard it in my head when I read the book. When Darkfever was first released in print, I read it, turned it over, and immediately read it a second time. Then I splurged and downloaded this one from AudioBookStandDL (see Aural Pleasures 101). In this case, the story was so engrossing that it overcame my initial awkward reactions to the narrator. And it is amazing how much more I STILL got out of the audio even though I had just read the print book twice! (click to sample Brilliance Audio)

Virgin Books Limited produces the Black Lace (yes THAT Black Lace– erotica for women) audio books (click to sample Audible.com audio). One of my all-time favorite books is A Gentlemen’s Wager by Madelynne Ellis (to be re-released in print with this luscious new cover early next year followed by the long awaited sequel, Phantasmagoria), but the audio book didn’t quite live up to my expectations. To my Midwest American ear, the narrator, Betsy Garden, sounded too contemporary (the book is set in Georgian England) and did not create the distinctive character voices I’ve come to expect. So I couldn’t settle into the audio until I just accepted her narration as a Joan Collins or a Victoria Beckham reading the book out loud. [hee] Nevertheless, I STILL managed to view a couple of scenes in a new light. It wasn’t truly disappointing, I just think it was a missed opportunity to bring even more dimension to a story that contains one of the most deliciously complex characters (Vaughan) I’ve ever read (click to sample AGW).

And the Dud Duck Award goes to…

The Raintree Trilogy (Inferno, Haunted, Sanctuary), Silhouette Nocturnes published by Harlequin Enterprises LTD. The trilogy is an enjoyable, multi-author (Linda Howard, Linda Winstead Jones, Beverly Barton), three-book story that was ruined by a bad narrator/story “fit.” Narrator Stefan Rudnicki pairs up with a different female co-narrator in each book (Hillary Huber, Theo McKell, Gabrielle de Cuir). I thought it was just a matter of acclimating myself to his style and, when Audible.com had a sale, I bought the last two books before I was finished with the first one. BIG mistake. First of all, Stefan Rudnicki should never, EVER, attempt a female voice again– he just sounds like he’s mocking women. And second, by the time I hit book three, I was gnashing my teeth and tempted to just go buy the print books so I would never have to listen to his.slow.style.of.speaking.ever.again. GAK! Buy these books in print or ebook only! (click to sample Audible.com audio… if you dare)

I’ve also downloaded some non-romance audio from Audible, too– including several episodes of Evening at the Improv and several episodes of Biography on A&E. These hold-up surprisingly well in audio format!

So help the current and future audio addicts out– have you listened to any audio books that elevated the original print story (they don’t necessarily have to be Romance)? Listened to any duds we should stay away from? If there’s enough interest maybe Syb will take pity on us poor desperate addicts and let us periodically have audio book rec sessions, which should make the selection process easier for all of us. C’mon and share– you KNOW you want to!

Don’t Miss:
Aural Pleasures 101 – “Why” and “Where” to buy Audio Books – Tell us why you listen to audio books.
Aural Pleasures 102 – “How” to Select an Audio Book – Come share your tips for selection.

Read more from Bev at Cubie’s Confections.