The Dangerous Mr. Ryder by Louise Allen releases 1 July 2008.  Read on for more on a whole family of notorious goodness…

It is whispered about the ton that one Mr R-, long known for his ability to escape the honest bonds of matrimony in favour of a dishonest day’s work – has finally met his match! Jack Ryder, spy and adventurer knows that escorting the haughty Grand Duchess Eva to England one step ahead of Napoleon’s forces will not be an easy task. But then what started as just another mission becomes something far more personal…

Summary:

He knows that escorting the haughty Grand Duchess of Maubourg to England will not be an easy task. But Jack Ryder, spy and adventurer, believes he is more than capable of managing Her Serene Highness.

He’s not prepared for her beauty, her youth, or the way that her sensual warmth shines through her cold facade.

And what started as just another mission is rapidly becoming something far more personal….

E-X-C-E-R-P-T

From Chapter One…

No-one had told him that she was beautiful. Jack Ryder crouched precariously in a stone window embrasure two hundred feet above the ravine river bed and stared into the candlelit room. Inside, the woman he had been sent to find paced to and fro like an angry cat.

It was definitely time to get off this widow ledge. He grasped the frame, put his feet through and swung himself down into the room. There was no way he could land silently, not dropping eight foot onto a stone flagged floor in nailed boots. She spun round on her chair, gripping the back of it, her face reflecting the gamut of emotions from shock, puzzlement, fear and finally, he was impressed to see, imperious anger masking all else. They had not told him about her courage.

‘Who the devil are you?’ she demanded in unaccented English, getting to her feet with perfect deportment, as though rising from a throne. Her right hand, Jack noted, was behind her: he searched his memory for his survey of the room. Ah yes, the paper knife. A resourceful lady.

‘You speak English excellently,’ he commented. He knew from his briefing that she was half English, so it was only to be expected, but it was a more tactful beginning to their conversation than Put down that knife before I make you! might be. ‘But how did you know I would understand you?’

She looked down her nose at him. Jack registered dark eyes, thinly elegant eyebrows arched in distain, a red mouth with a fullness which betrayed more passion than she was perhaps comfortable with and one deep brown curl, disturbed from her coiffure and lying tantalisingly against her white shoulder. He focused on those eyes and banished the fleeting speculation about just how the skin under that curl would feel.

‘You will address me as Your Serene Highness,’ she said coolly. ‘I was thinking in English,’ she added, almost as an afterthought.

‘Your Serene Highness,’ he swept her a bow, conscious of his clothing as he did so. He was dressed for the purpose of shinning down castle walls, not making court bows, but he managed it with a grace that had one of those dark brows lifting in surprise. ‘My name is Jack Ryder.’ He had wrestled with whether or not to tell her his real name and decided against it. His nom de guerre would be safer in the event they were captured.

‘Then you are English Mr Ryder?’

‘Yes ma’am.’

‘So you have not come to kill me?’

www.louiseallenregency.co.uk

Louise Allen – Those Scandalous Ravenhursts. Seven close cousins, six very different love stories:

The Dangerous Mr. Ryder – July 2008

The Outrageous Lady Felsham – August 2008

The Shocking Lord Standon – September 2008

And in 2009:

The Disgraceful Mr. Ravenhurst

The Notorious Mr. Hurst

The Piratical Miss Ravenhurst