The Taming of the Rake

Dear Reader,

In the more than thirty years I’ve been spinning stories, and with the more than one hundred heroes I’ve created, I’ve written about a few who have not qualified as “angels.” But none of them were bastards. Well, at least not according to the legal definition.

Then I had this idea about three bastard sons of an English marquess and an actress mother. Loved by their father, educated “above their station,” rigged out, with scads of money in their pockets and, of course, handsome as sin. Where do they fit in an age and a society that stakes so much on pristine lineage? Certainly no papa would hand his daughter over to a bastard, no matter how wealthy or civilised that suitor might be. No, the bastard would be relegated to the very fringes of society, caught between two worlds, belonging to neither.

Well, that couldn’t happen, not in my world! Love simply has to conquer all! But it would take three very special young ladies to defy convention and their families, and sacrifice their own place in society, all for the love of a brash, or a fun-loving, or a brooding and secretive Blackthorn brother.

Come along, meet Beau Blackthorn and the woman who will risk everything—not to defy her brother as she thought, but for the love of a most unacceptable yet irresistible man. Then, please, watch for A Midsummer Night’s Sin and Much Ado About Rogues, coming soon. The Blackthorn Brothers. You’re going to love them!

Happy reading,

Kasey Michaels

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To my daughters and best friends, Anne and Megan, with love

“Men have died from time to time,

and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”

—As You Like It, William Shakespeare

OLIVER LE BEAU BLACKTHORN was young and in love, which made him a candidate for less than intelligent behavior on two counts.

And so it was that, with the clouded vision of a man besotted, that same Oliver Le Beau Blackthorn, raised to think quite highly of himself, the equal to all men, did, with hat figuratively in hand, hope in his heart and a bunch of posies clutched to his breast, bound up the marble steps to the mansion in Portland Place one fine spring morning and smartly rap the massive door with the lion’s head brass knocker.

Oliver, known to his family as Beau, performed a quick mental inventory of his appearance, one he’d worked over for a full two hours, crumpling both a half dozen neck cloths and his valet’s abused nerves in the process.

He was presenting himself in a morning rigout of finest tan buckskins, dazzlingly white linen, a stunning yet unobtrusive waistcoat of marvelously brushed silk shot through with cleverly designed stripes made of the lightest tan thread and a darkest blue jacket that so closely followed the lines of his young, leanly muscled body that he could not manage to get his arms in or out of the sleeves without assistance.

He’d practiced the jaunty positioning of his curly brimmed beaver in front of the pier glass in his dressing room for a full ten minutes before pronouncing the angle satisfactory; showing off his thick crop of sun-streaked blond hair rather than crushing it, providing just enough cover from the brim that his bright blue eyes were not cast into the shade.

It only just now occurred to him that the hat would be handed over to the Brean footman, along with his new tan kid gloves and walking stick, and Lady Madelyn would never see them.

Hmm, no one had as yet answered his knock. Shabby, that’s what that was. He lifted his hand to the knocker once more, just as the door opened, and very nearly tapped on the footman’s nose.

Beau glared at the fellow, who stepped back quickly, and the well-tailored Mr. Blackthorn sauntered into the black-and-white marble-tiled foyer, feeling his cheeks growing hot and damning his lifelong tendency to blush.