Feature and Giveaway: Scandal in the Night by Elizabeth Essex

When the Reckless Brides set their sights on England’s eligible bachelors, nothing can stop them. But when they are strangers in a strange land, anything can happen…

The Spy Who Loved Her

Assuming a false identity as a prim and proper governess, the bold and beautiful Cat Rowan thinks she has finally escaped the wild misadventures of her past—and the wickedly handsome spy who seduced her in India. Imagine her surprise when her employer introduces his brother: the very same cad who destroyed her heart!

The One Who Got Away

The Honorable Thomas Jellicoe cannot believe his eyes when he sees his beloved Cat—the Scottish beauty who nearly jeopardized his mission in India. Disguised as a horse trader from the bazaars of the Punjab, the British spy risked his life for one night of passion in her arms. But here and now—breaking all rules of decorum—one heated kiss ignites a flurry of gunfire. For their enemies have followed them home. And love is the greatest danger of all…

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“I became a spy.” It gave Thomas little pleasure to have his work described thusly. However good he had been at it, gathering intelligence, spying was hardly an honorable profession for a gentleman. He had hoped never to mention his erstwhile career to his family—only to tell them he had made his fortune in horse trading and breeding. “You see, in India there was a northern proverb: `Let thy hair grow long and talk Punjabi, and thou shalt make a Sikh.'”

Thomas had first heard it spoken by his superior, Colonel Augustus Balfour, on the day almost fourteen years before, when Thomas had ridden back from his first assignment for the East India Company. Alone.

“Almost as soon as I had arrived in India, I was sent upon a particularly mortal expedition to buy horses for breeding stock in Baluchistan. Of all the Englishmen sent out by the Company on that expedition—twenty-three men—only I lived.”

Even after the passage of so many intervening years, the loss still ached like a bruise that should have long since healed.

Only he had survived the rigors of a year of caravan travel, the exposure to disease, the ravages of climate, and the predations of bandits and tribesmen, to return a different man than the boy who had left. When he had finally made it back to Delhi, he had looked and spoken more like a native than any son of pale Albion.

“A Colonel Balfour was the resident commissioner of the northwest provinces back then, and when I had told him all the things I had seen and heard in the course of the long journey, and what I had learned to make of them, well, that cagey gentleman concocted a devious, but simple plan. It was decided. I would go with him to Saharanpur, and Tanvir Singh, Sikh, trader of horses, finder of information, giver and keeper of secrets, I would become. I wrapped my hair that had grown overlong and unruly in a turban, and donned the kirpan and kara, the ceremonial dagger and silver bracelet, as the outward signs of the Sikh religion.”

James leaned forward in morbid curiosity. “Just like that? You take up a pagan religion?”

“It's not pagan, it's monotheistic.” But he did not have the leisure to debate theology with his brother. “I was a spy, James. That's how it's done. You can dissect my moral compromises at some later date.”

He had become the company's most secret weapon, passing across borders with impunity. He had learned to cull the meaningful facts out of his observations, while at the same time keeping himself invisible, hidden in plain sight amongst the teeming masses. “I took up a lot of things for expediency's sake.”

“Including Miss Cates?” his father probed.

“No.” Thomas's tone was every bit as steely and uncompromising as his sire's, hard and tempered by experience, full of the man he had become. “Do not make unfounded assumptions. There was nothing expedient about my association with your Miss Cates.”

Yet, how could he explain what Cat had been to him? It would do him little credit in his family's eyes to know he had abandoned the English way of life without looking back, and never thought another thing about it, through all the years he had roamed back and forth across kingdoms, deserts, and frontiers, until that late spring morning two years ago, when an angrezi woman in Rani Bazaar had looked at him, and made him feel something keen and bittersweet about the life he had so easily left behind.

It had been altogether unwelcome, that pang. He had loved his role as a clandestine agent in the Great Game of espionage between all the many powers in the shadows of the Hindu Kush. He had loved the horses, loved their beauty and their heart, and he loved most of all the freedom to go where he liked, and the intrigue of finding what went on everywhere he looked.

“It suited me—Balfour's version of spying. I was free to travel, and trade and breed horses. I earned an independent fortune doing so. I was beholden to no one, so long as I brought secrets, along with my horses, down from the Maharajah Ranjiit Singh's powerful Kingdom of the Punjab and offered them to the company.”

And they had taken him and his intelligence for granted, the company, like a plate of sweetmeats left outside a door by an obedient, invisible servant.

Yet, that morning, in the Rani Bazaar, the girl had appeared to him like the insistent vision of a remorseful angel, come to remind him of what he was, and who he had once been below the surface of his darkened skin. She drew his eye like a bright flame, a cold-burning torch amid the heat and profusion of the bazaar. An angrezi woman so very white, she was exotic.

She had looked up at him then, with her pale, clear gray eyes so composed and solemn, and something within him—the part of his soul that had unbeknownst to him grown weary of deception and restlessness—stilled and came to rest. Something within him whispered home.

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When not rereading Jane Austen, mucking about in her garden and simply messing about with boats, award-winning author Elizabeth Essex can be always be found with her laptop, making up stories about heroes and heroines who live far more exciting lives than she. It wasn’t always so. Long before she ever set pen to paper, Elizabeth graduated from Hollins College with a BA in Classics, and then earned her MA in Nautical Archaeology from Texas A&M University. While she loved the life of an underwater archaeologist, she has found her true calling writing lush, lyrical historical romance full of passion, daring and adventure.

Elizabeth lives in Texas with her husband, the indispensable Mr. Essex, and her active and exuberant family in an old house filled to the brim with books.

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