Teaser: The Devil Comes Courting
Captain Grayson Hunter knows the battle to complete the first worldwide telegraphic network will be fierce, and he intends to win it by any means necessary. When he hears about a reclusive genius who has figured out how to slash the cost of telegraphic transmissions, he vows to do whatever it takes to get the man in his employ.
Except the reclusive genius is not a man, and she’s not looking for employment.
Amelia Smith was born in Shanghai as a child and was taken in by English missionaries. She’s not interested in Captain Hunter’s promises or his ambitions. But the harder he tries to convince her, the more she realizes that there is something she wants from him: She wants everything. And she’ll have to crack the frozen shell he’s made of his heart to get it.
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Other Books by Courtney
The Worth Saga
Once Upon a Marquess
Her Every Wish
After the Wedding
The Pursuit Of…
~coming soon~
The Devil Comes Courting
The Return of the Scoundrel
The Kissing Hour
A Tale of Two Viscounts
The Once and Future Earl
The Cyclone Series
Trade Me
Hold Me
Find Me
What Lies Between Me and You
Keep Me
The Brothers Sinister Series
The Governess Affair
The Duchess War
A Kiss for Midwinter
The Heiress Effect
The Countess Conspiracy
The Suffragette Scandal
Talk Sweetly to Me
The Turner Series
Unveiled
Unlocked
Unclaimed
Unraveled
Not in any series
A Right Honorable Gentleman
What Happened at Midnight
The Lady Always Wins
The Carhart Series
This Wicked Gift
Proof by Seduction
Trial by Desire
Author’s Note
I got the idea for this book many years ago when I was reading ecclesiastical law for fun, because that is a thing that I do.
Specifically, I was reading about annulments, because there is an idea that is sometimes promulgated in historical romances that annulments are relatively easy to obtain as long as you don’t consummate the marriage. This is not actually true; annulments are terribly difficult to obtain, even if you have never had intercourse, and most of the ways that people claim you can annul a marriage are, in fact, not accurate.
So yes—to the best of my ability, what Adrian and Camilla discover about annulment over the course of the book is correct.
You can annul a marriage for lack of consent, but the standards for “lack of consent” back then do not track what we consider to be a lack of consent today.
What Adrian says about not holding yourself out to be married is true—if you told people a woman was your wife, even if you were married at gunpoint, the ecclesiastical courts might claim that you had consented to be married after the fact.
If someone tells you that they can determine virginity on physical inspection, they are lying to you.
Like just about everything else in life, it was a lot easier to get a marriage annulled if you had power and money. I exaggerated the degree to which that mattered in the two stories of Miss Laney Tabbott and Jane Leland, but it still mattered.
I got the idea for some of the specifics of this book back when I was writing The Suffragette Scandal in 2014, when I wrote this line: “It would be like the Archbishop of Canterbury calling a select club of his compatriots ‘Bad, Bad Bishops’.” For some reason, the phrase “Bad, Bad Bishops” just tickled the heck out of me, and it became the code name for this book.
There are two things mentioned in this book that are purposefully ahistorical. One is the underglazing colors that Adrian describes. I purposefully tried not to say too much about the production of china in this book because this is not a book about the production of china, but basically, the colors that can be used under the initial glaze were historically quite limited because the glaze needs to be fired at an incredibly high temperature. That temperature means that chemical reactions occur, and a dye that might start out as one color would turn into something else at heat.
As our knowledge of chemistry progressed, the colors we can use have been expanded. Adrian (and the business that his family runs) have historical access to minerals that would allow them to have a broader spectrum of underglaze colors.
The second thing I mention will be a much larger issue in the third full-length book in this series. I mention that Grayson wants to lay a transpacific telegraph cable. In reality, that cable was not laid until early in the twentieth century. There was, however, no reason it could not be put down earlier. There will be more about Grayson and the telegraph in the third book.
Acknowledgments
I have so many people to thank for this book. First, for those who had a direct hand in its creation—Lindsey Faber, Rawles Lumumba, Louisa Jordan, Martha Trachtenberg, and Wendy Chan—my unending gratitude for working with me on impossible deadlines that were endlessly delayed.
Special thanks to those friends of mine, who were there for me when I needed them most. Rebekah Weatherspoon, Alisha Rai, Bree Bridges, Alyssa Cole, Rose Lerner, Erica Ridley, and Tessa Dare were all there during the hardest times of the last ten years. Lucas Watkins and Chris Walker listened to me and believed me.
My dog, my cat, and Mr. Milan all gave me snuggles when I needed them, and I needed a lot of snuggles.
And there’s you, my readers. I will thank you, but first, I owe you an apology. I said something at the end of Once upon a Marquess like “I’m not the fastest writer…” And I said something like maybe this book would come out at the end of 2016?
I had no idea how slowly things were going to go. I am so sorry.
I’ve talked a little about why things went slowly for me—and the dedication for this book is a little personal, even for a book dedication.
All of my books have aspects of who I am in them, and I don’t think this one is much different. But I wrote the first few scenes that appeared in this book—the ones that took place in the rectory—a few years ago, shortly after I’d written Once Upon a Marquess. Maybe I should have known then that there was a problem.
Sometimes we write books to challenge ourselves, but sometimes our challenges show up in our books.
I hope I am never that slow a writer again. I often say that I hope this book was worth the wait; in this case, the wait was pretty darned long, and so that may create too high a standard. All I can say is that if I had tried to publish what I had sooner, it definitely wouldn’t have been worth it.
I didn’t know that this needed to be a book about hope until I had found mine.
So finally, I’d like to thank myself. I know it’s a little gauche, but I have been writing romance for ten years now because I always believed in hope, even if I didn’t know the reason for it.
I’m glad I found the reason.
Courtney Milan, After the Wedding
(Series: The Worth Saga # 2)
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