The Devil Earl
Out Of A Midnight Coach Stepped Ravenscar…The Perfect Gothic Mystery Man Dark and brooding and rumored to have done murder, the Devil Earl was everything Prudence Lancaster's imagination could conjure. But he was also flesh and blood, and infinitely more seductive than anything she had ever created.In his presence, the dreamy authoress became a sultry sleuth, hungry to solve the mystery of Ravenscar's missing brother and to save her beloved Devil Earl from his own wicked legacy… ."Deborah Simmons guarantees a page-turner… " - Romantic Times
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Table of Contents
“Stop looking as though you expect me to drag you off and ravish you,”
the earl said softly.
The words were spoken in an amused tone, and yet his gray gaze had not softened, and the way he said “ravish” made Prudence blink behind her spectacles.
“Oh, my!” she whispered, half to herself, as she snapped open her fan. “I beg your pardon if I have been gaping at you oddly, my lord.” She fanned herself rapidly. “I am not sure what has come over me lately. It is rather warm in here, is it not?”
“Undoubtedly,” Ravenscar agreed, his appealing mouth curving sensuously. “Uncomfortably warm, I would say.”
There was a wry note in his voice that made Prudence glance up at his eyes again. It was a mistake, for they swept over her anew like storm clouds racing and churning with the heady promise of lightning.
“Oh, my,” Prudence muttered again as a moment of silence as charged as his look stretched between them…
Dear Reader,
The Devil Earl from Deborah Simmons is a delightful new Regency with a calm, sensible heroine who is determined to heal the wounded soul of the dark and brooding Earl of Ravenscar, the inspiration for the heroes in her popular Gothic novels. And be sure to keep an eye out for Deborah’s new medieval novel, Maiden Bride, coming in September.
Also out this month, the third book in award-winning author Theresa Michaels’s Kincaid Trilogy, Once a Lawman, features the oldest Kincaid brother, a small-town sheriff who must choose between family and duty as he works to finally bring to justice the criminals who’ve been plaguing his family’s ranch.
Miranda Jarrett’s hero, Captain Nick Sparhawk, is tormented by a meddlesome angel bent on matchmaking in Sparhawk’s Angel, which Romantic Times calls “delightful, unforgettably funny and supremely touching.” And an indentured servant is torn between her affection for her good-hearted master and her growing love for the rugged frontiersman who is guiding them to a new life in the territories in Ana Seymour’s new Western, Frontier Bride.
We hope you will enjoy all four titles, and come back for more. Please keep a lookout for Hartequin Historicals, available wherever books are sold.
Sincerely,
Tracy Farrell
Senior Editor
Please address questions and book requests to:
Hartequin Reader Service
U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269
Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3
DEBORAH SIMMONS
began her writing career as a newspaper reporter. She turned to fiction after the birth of her first child when a long-time love of historical romance prompted her to pen her own work, published in 1989. She lives with her husband, two children and two cats in rural Ohio, where she divides her time between her family, reading and writing. She enjoys hearing from readers at the address below. For a reply, an SASE is appreciated.
Deborah Simmons
P.O. Box 274 Ontario, OH 44862-0274
This book is dedicated to Lynn Dominick,
Deb Jeffers, Marie Mattingly and all the staff of the Galion Public Library for their continual assistance, support and encouragement.
Autumn—1818
Cornwall, England
The wind howled. The shutters rattled.
Millicent swooned.
The specter rose up, a chilling vision, to loom over her
prostrate form…
“Drat!” Prudence muttered. Pushing her slipping spectacles back into place, she frowned at the sheet of foolscap before her. Her heroine was swooning far too frequently, and the specter very much resembled the apparition in her last book, The Mysterious Alphorise. Her second effort was simply not going well at all.
What she needed was…inspiration. With a sigh of frustration, Prudence gazed out the window at what had always provided her with the necessary stimulus: Wolfinger Abbey.
Of course, Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels were what had given her the courage to take up writing herself, but it was the abbey that stirred her creative spirit. It stood high up on the edge of the sea cliff, enshrouded in mist, its dark gray stone stark against the bleak sky, its towers home to the earls of Ravenscar for hundreds of years.
What secrets did it hold? Prudence had always pondered them, and even as a child she had woven tales of death and destruction, passion and murder, for the area’s most famous structure. Rumors spoke of a vast network of tunnels that lay beneath it, used by wreckers and smugglers not so long ago, but, to her great disappointment, Prudence had never found a single shaft.
When she was a young girl, she and the village children had dared each other to pass the gloomy gates or creep into the cemetery where the monks who had once walked its halls were buried. But the others had always fled, shrieking in terror, when they got close, leaving Prudence to be turned away by the aged caretaker.
