Historical/Romance
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One Stolen Christmas -A festive novel from the Romance for the Seasons collection by Darcy Laurent
A seductive, heartwarming holiday romance full of winter charm and second chances. Proving it’s never too late to find love… even when you least expect it.
Everyone knows Annabelle as someone else: Aunt, Mother, the late Lord Warrington’s widow… it feels as if her true identity has been lost. Then, one Christmas, trapped in a blizzard and far away from her everyday life and expectations, Annabelle is at last free to be herself. To her surprise, it becomes the Christmas she thought she would never have: a festive holiday so perfect, it is like a dream.
Until it all goes wrong.
Charming and distinguished, Lord Richard Scott, has suffered terribly at the hands of the young wife he was all but tricked into marrying, and now publicly humiliated, all he longs for is solitude and peace. When he is trapped at his local inn, during the worst snowstorm for over a decade, Lord Scott meets the beautiful and intriguing Ms Annabelle Sharpe.
Together, they share the most wonderful Yuletide either has ever known, but someone from the past returns to shatter their joy; ensuring that the course of true love never did run smooth…
Join Annabelle and Lord Scott in this captivating historical romance by Darcy Laurent. A standalone novel, from the Romance for the Seasons Series, this is the perfect Christmas romance to cosy up with and kindle your festive spirits. Enjoy Annabelle and Lord Scott’s romantic journey in and out of several festive seasons, as history and circumstance do their best to keep them apart. Will their ending be merry and bright?
Though part of The Romance for the Seasons Collection, all of these novels by Darcy Laurent are standalone stories and can be enjoyed in any order. Please note there is some adult content.
Fans of Julia Quinn, Lisa Kleypas and Emily Larkin will enjoy all of Darcy Laurent’s seductively escapist Regency romances – happy ever afters are, of course, guaranteed.
Bella Cummings, Wild West Madam by Cherie Mitchell
A hot and racy Wild West Mail Order Bride tale with a spicy twist. In the days of the Californian gold rush, many astute business-minded women made their fortunes by offering their bodies for sale or by establishing houses of pleasure to provide services for the men who flooded the region. And many of these women did very well for themselves, with records revealing that one young lady made today’s equivalent of $1 million in just three months. This is the story of Bella Cummings, a young woman determined to make the best of her life in a man’s world, and a story based on real lives as they were lived in the late 1800’s.
New York, 1878. Bella Cummings is leaving New York City for a new life out West, far away from the life of woman-for-rent which she has had thrust upon her through no fault of her own. Bella’s new start includes marriage to a Californian gold miner, a man she has never met but who has placed an advertisement for a bride in the local newspaper and whom she hopes will hold the key to a bright new future.
Her new husband Harry Williams is everything she has ever wanted in a man and all Bella needs to do now is keep the secret of her sordid past from him. However, Bella should have known that she was never destined for an easy life. And when she finds herself alone in the largely male populated gold mining town of Yreka, Northern California in the heat of the heady gold rush days, what is a girl to do to survive except fall back on the very assets she was born with?
Bella Cummings is a woman of much grit and determination but underneath it all, she just wants to be loved. Will she ever meet a man who wants her for her heart and not just for her very desirable body, a man who will truly be hers forever?
Love of an Unknown Soldier by John Howlett
Epic love story set in the First World War – the unlikely and fraught romance between an American Nurse from Boston and an English infantry Corporal, originally a shepherd from the border hills. In the trenches they call him the ‘Cheviot Sting’ – Harry Cardwell, a tough young Lance-Jack you wouldn’t challenge even at arm-wrestling. The 21 year-old shepherd from the border hills is already one of the ‘veterans’ of the Somme battlefield. Returning from leave Harry confronts a burly Sergeant auctioning off a tin of very intimate love-letters and photographs found in a shelled dug-out. Trying to protect the privacy of those letters, Harry buys them himself. A simple act of decency that is to have a lifetime of consequence. Encouraged by two of his young officers, Harry eventually finds the girl in the photographs, the intended recipient of those passionate love-letters. Annie is a nurse from New England, former volunteer with her doctor husband on a Harvard Medical Unit, she has ended up a widow on an ambulance train serving the Western Front. ‘We are two strangers who meet in hell’, she writes to Harry. ‘We come from two different worlds and have no mutual friends. Why should we hide anything from one another?’
