As a child, Jennifer Haymore traveled the South Pacific with her family on their homebuilt sailboat. The months spent on the sometimes quiet, sometimes raging seas sparked her love of adventure and grand romance. Since then, she's earned degrees in computer science and education and held various jobs ranging from bookselling to teaching inner-city children to acting, but she's never stopped writing.
You can find Jennifer in Southern California trying to talk her husband into yet another trip to England, helping her three children with homework while brainstorming a new five-minute dinner menu, or crouched in a corner of the local bookstore writing her next novel.
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Excerpt from The Scoundrel' Seduction:
Sam watched Dunthorpe skim the papers,
his movements growing more frantic, his eyes widening at what he was
reading—all the sordid details about the plot, with the slight twist
eliminating Dunthorpe from the list of those at fault and instead pointing to him
as the hero.
“You
bastard. This isn’t the schedule.” He flung the papers away. They fluttered to
the floor as Dunthorpe lifted dark, furious eyes at him. “Who are you?” he
growled.
Sam
raised a brow. His heart wasn’t even beating hard. He might as well have been
sitting in his desk chair reading the Times.
What
did this say about him? If nothing else, it said that he was too far gone to
ever feel truly human again.
He
shrugged and said softly, using his own, English-accented voice, “I am a
concerned citizen. For God, king, and country, my lord. We cannot let you
destroy it.”
He
reached into his coat again, this time drawing out his weapon, cocking it at
the same time. But Dunthorpe was faster than his aging appearance made him out
to be. The man scrambled backward, hands fumbling with the desk drawer behind him. He jerked it open and yanked out his own pistol as Sam advanced on him, aiming.
Sam possessed the advantage. He had
plenty of time. His heartbeat had still not increased in tempo. He was
perfectly calm.
He squeezed the trigger while
Dunthorpe’s gun was still pointed at the floor.
The resulting boom of gunfire echoed
through Sam’s skull, loud enough to rouse every Londoner in a half-mile radius.
Dunthorpe lurched backward and slammed into the desk, his body flailing as if
he were a rag doll before crumpling to the carpeted floor.
For the first time, Sam’s heart kicked
against his ribs. Now he needed to
hurry. Needed to vanish before the authorities were summoned, before Richards
showed his face in this room. Sam didn’t want to hurt the butler—there was no
evidence that he had been privy to any of Dunthorpe’s traitorous deeds.
Sam glanced at Dunthorpe’s fallen body,
saw that the shot had been clean, straight through the man’s heart. He quickly
bent down to check for a pulse. The viscount was already dead.
Rising, Sam strode to the window and
shook the curtains to signal Laurent that he was on his way down. Then he
turned and made for the door.
A noise stopped him in his tracks. A
tiny, feminine whimper. One he wouldn’t have heard had every one of his senses
not been on high alert.
He homed in on the source of the noise,
turning to that little round table tucked into the corner. It was covered with
a silk tablecloth whose edges brushed the carpeted floor.
In two long strides, he was at the
table. He ripped the tablecloth away, sending the china tea service that had
lain upon it crashing to the floor. Hot tea splashed against his boots,
steaming when it made contact with the cold leather.
It smelled damn good—strong and brisk.
He wished Dunthorpe had offered him some.
A woman cowered beneath the table.
A small, blond, frail-looking woman
dressed in white and curled up into a tight ball, as if she might be able to make herself so tiny he wouldn’t be able to see her.
Goddammit. A woman. Sam ground his teeth.
She glanced up at him, her
midnight-blue eyes shining with terror. “Please,” she whispered. “Please.”
Her slight French accent clicked
everything into place. He knew who she was, of course. It was the surprise of
seeing her so out of her element—cowering under a table—that had shocked him
into not recognizing her immediately. He’d laid eyes on her once before, when
he’d
been watching Dunthorpe’s movements. A
month ago, she’d been on Dunthorpe’s arm as they’d strolled into the Royal
Opera House.
It was Lady Dunthorpe,
Dunthorpe’s beautiful, elegant, cultured French
wife. She’d emigrated from France during the Revolution, after her entire
family had suffered
the wrath of the guillotine.
She’d been rescued, sent to relatives who had found sanctuary in England, and
had married Dunthorpe ten or eleven years ago. It was then that Dunthorpe’s
ties to the French had grown much stronger.
Because, of course, she was in
league with him. She must be.
She wasn’t supposed to be here
tonight. She’d been at her residence in Brighton and wasn’t due back in London
for another week. Men had been watching the house for days, and no one had
reported her entering or exiting the building.
Bloody hell.
“Get up,” he told her brusquely.
Her eyes flicked toward Dunthorpe, who
lay on the floor, blood seeping across his
chest and turning his gray coat black. She drew in a terrified, stuttering
breath. But she didn’t get up.
Sam considered his options.
Killing her with Dunthorpe’s pistol was the first idea that came to mind. The
odds were that she was as guilty as Dunthorpe was.
But Sam had drawn solid lines
between those acts he would and would not commit. He would steal, lie, torture,
and assassinate in the interests of king and country. He would not commit
cold-blooded murder of an innocent British citizen, even to save his own hide.
He would not perform any act that would put a member of his family in danger. And he would not kill a woman.
Those lines were all he had left—all
he had to use as the threads by which he grasped on to the unraveling spool of
his humanity.
Killing her was out of the
question.
He could leave her here.
But she knew too much. Just from
the short conversation he’d had with Dunthorpe, she would have learned enough
to put everything at risk.
That left the only other option,
one that was almost as unpalatable as the other two. He had to bring her with
him.
“Get
up,” he repeated. His voice sounded harsh even to his own ears.
“I . .
. don’t . . . Please, I . . .” She moaned, appearing to make a valiant effort
to follow his command but failing, her limbs trembling too violently to support
her.
He jammed his pistol back into
his coat pocket and crouched down beside her, aware that his time was already
up. They needed to leave this place. Now.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he
told her, and he prayed that it was true. “But I need you to come with me.”
She made a little moaning sound
of despair. With a sigh, Sam scooped her into his arms and rose. God, she was a
little thing. Light as a feather. But she was stiff in his arms.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said
again. Although he didn’t blame her for not believing him. How could he? She’d
just witnessed him kill her husband in cold blood.
He turned to the door, to the only
escape from this room, and froze, tucking Lady Dunthorpe’s rigid, shaking body
tightly against him.
Running footsteps resounded on
the wooden floor of the outside corridor, and then the door flew open.
Damn
it. He’d run out of time.
