Greetings, friends! Are you ready for deliciously romantic excerpt from Joana Starnes?! ❣️ Prepare yourself, this might be the most romantic one she has shared with us yet! 😍 Ahhhhh!!!! I am so excited to welcome you back, Joana! Thank you so much for stopping by and celebrating your book – which will release in just 6 more days!!! 🙌🏼

Thanks so much, Meredith, for having me as your guest for a second time on the Twists of Fate blog tour, and many thanks, everyone, for joining us today!

If you stopped by for the Cover reveal and the un-Hunsford-like proposal, you’ve already seen the book trailer. If you haven’t seen it yet, have a quick peek:

~ Book Description ~

What if Mr Collins shocked Elizabeth with his base conduct at the time of his proposal, thus sending her dashing out of her house, and into the arms of Mr Darcy? What if that accidental encounter was witnessed, and impropriety was assumed? What if Mr Darcy was glad of the excuse to marry his heart’s desire – only to have his best hopes blasted within hours of his wedding? What if he found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time more than once?

Evil rumours, an early marriage, a dreadful misunderstanding, an old secret and good intentions gone awry. What if ‘I do’ is not the end, but the beginning of the adventure?

~ Excerpt ~

In the cover reveal post I promised I’d bring another romantic excerpt at my next visit. As this is the last excerpt on the blog tour, I think the romance should go up a notch (or several). Also, I think that the excerpt should answer at least one of the questions that came up along the way. This question, for instance: How long would Mr Darcy brood, if left to his own devices?

Bring a cool drink or a fan, dear friends, and I hope the answer will not scandalise you 🙂

Here it comes:

Excerpt from Twists of Fate

Elizabeth’s first thought was that the bed was delectably warm. Her toes certainly appreciated the sensation. She had not noticed at the time how cold her feet had grown while she had stood about on icy floorboards. So she stretched her legs under the counterpane and allowed her toes to luxuriate in the newfound cosiness.

The rest of her was not quite so comfortable with the experience. In fact, now that she thought about it and paused to take note, every fibre of her being – except her grateful toes – was as taut as a bowstring at her unimaginable daring. She had tiptoed in the middle of the night into a gentleman’s bedchamber, and was now lying beside him in his bed!

Her husband’s bed, Elizabeth pointedly reminded herself, and took a deep breath. Needs must, and so forth. If he would not come to her, something had to be done about it.

She took another deep breath, then another, and it eventually occurred to her to time her breathing by his. It was slow – measured – calming. Very calming. So much so that the rest of her began to find wisdom in following her toes’ example, relax and stretch and delight in the warmth, rather than give too much thought to its source. That would only serve to bring back the tension.

It would be a fine to-do if she were to fall asleep, Elizabeth thought when the tension ebbed and the warmth began to do its office. His response to finding her there in the morning made for yet another diverting speculation. Well, she could always claim she was given to sleepwalking.

The nervous quip left her mind almost as soon as it came, for it was just that: a quip in response to agitation. She was not of a mind to fall asleep in his bed and brave whatever the morning was to bring. She would much rather brave her future now. If not, she would lose whatever was left of her proverbial courage.

She turned towards him, and another deep breath acquainted her with the pleasant scent of the pillow. Starch, lavender and… something else she could not name. Familiar, yet not, and decidedly pleasant. It brought a delectable sense of anticipation, and also a flutter deep in the pit of her stomach, neither of which Elizabeth could account for, not at first. Then it came to her: the vaguely familiar scent was his – as she had discovered the other day, on their walk, when he had kissed her.

The agreeable recollection made her bold – or at least a trifle bolder. So she tentatively reached out into the darkness, until her fingertips encountered his shoulder. Warm and unmistakably bare, Elizabeth found, and her hand shot back of its own volition. Then she rolled her eyes at her preconceptions. Why ever had she imagined that he would sleep in a nightshirt? Why not a nightcap too? How positively ludicrous!

Her hand regained its earlier boldness and unerringly returned to the same point of contact. Once her fingertips brushed his shoulder, she trailed them in a light caress along his arm and blindly traced the contour of well-defined muscles, then changed course to find the plane of his chest. The wiry texture of hair – a fair amount of it – was a surprise, but it was the throb of heartbeats under her fingertips that stopped her in her explorations, or rather light caresses which she had hoped would wake him, but so far had not. She spread out her hand over the spot where she had first sensed his heartbeats and lay perfectly still as she felt the steady rhythm beating against her skin. His heart thudding softly into the palm of her hand. It was an overpowering sensation. She could not imagine anything more moving. Nor more intimate.

The light caress that retraced the path to his shoulder did not wake him either, so Elizabeth drew her hand away and tucked her other arm under her head – until a new resolve had her instantly acting on impulse, lest she see sense and change her mind.

She reached down and tugged at her chemise with steadiness of purpose. The deed presented its own difficulties – it was not the easiest thing in the world to remove one’s chemise while lying down – and the requisite wriggles brought enough of the awkward and the absurd as to amuse her briefly and distract her from the momentousness of her decision. But once she had managed to draw it all the way up, over her head and along her arms, and the garment was in her grasp, squeezed into a soft ball of fabric, Elizabeth was no longer disposed towards light merriment. She held on to the crumpled chemise for a few moments longer, hand poised above her head, then threw it into the darkness. Let the die be cast. After all, this was the natural conclusion of their latest encounters – the shocking one in her dressing room, and its baffling sequel over their unfinished breakfast.

She turned towards him yet again and inched closer, growing more and more aware of his radiating warmth. Intensely aware – unnervingly so.

She would have thought she would be all the more unnerved when a voice inside her head awoke to squeak, ‘Have you completely lost your mind?’

But Elizabeth silenced it and gave herself over to the recollection of the intoxicating heat that had seeped into her down to her very bones the other night, after dinner, when she had sat sipping sweet wine, warmed by the fire, his burning gaze and the electrifying thrill of his lips against her palm.

She leaned forward with nothing to guide her in the darkness but the feel of his breath on her face. It was a reliable guide though, and Elizabeth followed it, inhaling its appealing scent. Exceedingly appealing, and just as familiar. The kiss on their walk accounted for that too. So Elizabeth raised her chin and stretched a little further, until her lips brushed against something other than thin air and alighted on what seemed to be the tip of his nose.

And then she found his lips – softer than she remembered, warm and very still. But not still for long. They twitched under hers when she kissed him again, her mouth lingering on his with gentle pressure – another lesson learnt on their walk, the other day. Her experience was woefully limited in that regard, but she had always prided herself on being a quick learner and not averse to inquisitive exploration, Elizabeth impishly thought as she set about to diligently explore the contours of his lips.

The sweet response she had hoped to elicit was not long in coming. With a sleepy murmur, his lips moulded themselves to hers and he kissed her back – still half asleep, Elizabeth was prepared to wager. His growing eagerness was more than enough reason to hope that the surprise would be far from unpleasant, so she deepened the kiss with slow deliberation – and all of a sudden she was granted more than she had bargained for. His arm encircled her waist, drawing her close, his lips parted under hers with a groan and the kiss they shared grew nothing short of ravenous.

Elizabeth could easily tell the exact moment when he became fully awake. His arm went rigid and, with a sharp intake of breath, his lips froze into perfect stillness under hers. His whole frame froze too, still as a statue. A very warm statue that sprang back into life a fraction of a second later. His arm slipped from around her, and he drew back as he choked out a shocked, “Elizabeth?”

A nervous little chuckle escaped her, and then she whispered, “Yes. Who else were you expecting?”

For a long moment, there was silence, and she could sense nothing but his fast and shallow breaths on her face, which could not fail to make her intensely aware that he was very close – inches away. But still motionless. Not reaching. Not touching.

“I was not expecting you,” Darcy said at last, stating the obvious, and she could not determine what was the best answer she could make.

Out of necessity, she settled on archness.

“Perhaps I should have warned you of my worst tendency: I take perverse pleasure in confounding people by acting contrary to their expectations.”

“Don’t jest,” he shot back, his voice low and almost pleading.

Silence fell again – the sort of silence that threatened to stretch into eternity – and Elizabeth pondered on what she might say to break it, her mind working more frantically than ever. Frantically, but most ineffectually, for it kept stumbling at every turn over any number of unnerving notions.

The distance he had put between them was deeply unnerving too – a chasm Elizabeth dared not bridge, now that he was awake. A formidable chasm, however narrow, and severely daunting because it endured, even though he must have known as well as she that there was nothing but thin air – charged air, warm, vibrant, and not much of it – between their motionless bodies. Yet he remained as still as a living, breathing statue, and eventually asked in a gravelly whisper, “Why did you come?”

“I rather thought it was self-explanatory,” Elizabeth resorted to archness yet again. But she did not wait for a second entreaty to resist the ill-timed urge to jest, and in the same breath murmured, “Forgive me. One of my other tendencies is to be flippant when I am nervous.”

“I know,” Darcy said softly, and did not leave as long an interval of silence before he spoke again. “I do not wish you to be nervous. Nor feel coerced into anything.”

“Some nervousness is only natural, I think,” she sensibly replied. “As for the other, I would point out that I am here of my own free will. Impetuous of me, I grant you, and excessively forward,” Elizabeth added with a conscious chuckle, but sobered when she concluded, “Even so, I find it no less needful.”

“Needful!” he echoed harshly, and she felt the mattress move with energy when he rolled away from her, flinging himself onto his back. “No more talk of your duties, I beg you,” Darcy snapped – a demand, not a request. “This is not to be borne! I cannot— Will not— Elizabeth, you will not give yourself to me out of duty!”

The last word was spat out as if it were poison, which sparked the notion that he saw it thus – and gave her an increasingly clearer understanding of the root of their difficulties. The most recent one, at least.

“That was not my meaning,” Elizabeth said swiftly, with a forceful shake of her head, forgetting that he stood no chance of seeing that in the pitch-black room. “Not needful in the sense of an obligation. In the sense that something needed to be done,” she went on to explain, words flowing with greater ease once she had begun to grasp the reason for his withdrawal, and had ceased to see it as yet another dispiriting rejection. “To my way of thinking, we have laboured for long enough under the misconception that each wanted to have as little as possible to do with the other. So, since you would not come to me, it stood to reason that I needed to cross into your territory and put an end to our latest contretemps. Which, as I see it now, stemmed from awkwardness and… a euphemism.”

“A euphemism,” he repeated.

It was not worded as a question, but Elizabeth did not doubt that it was meant as such, so she elaborated:

“I am yet to learn the language of marriage and acquire some ease in using it. On reflection, ‘marital duties’ was a poor choice of words. I should have found another way of saying that I had not entered into this union with the wish to be married in name only. Nor, I daresay, did you.”

“No,” he breathed, and judging by the direction of his voice, she could tell that he had at least turned his head towards her. “But I will not make any demands of you until you are ready. Elizabeth, if you would rather wait—”

In a flash, she reached out into the darkness to press her fingers to his lips. She found that she could take some pride in the accuracy of her aim this time, yet lost all interest in congratulating herself on that particular achievement when a puff of air brushed her skin and sent her fingertips tingling. She trailed them over his cheek, and found it a little rough with late-night stubble, which sent them tingling too as she whispered, “I never thought that I should need to tell you this, but you do talk far too much sometimes.”

A strangled, throaty chuckle escaped him. Then he quietly observed, “First time I was accused of that.”

Her hand slid further in slow, caressing exploration, and she felt the jerky bob of his Adam’s apple when she airily replied, “Yes, well, there is a first time for everything.”

© 2021 Joana Starnes

Gahhhh!!!! How am I supposed to go on with the rest of my day?! Joana! This scene…and the promise of some previous scenes… I don’t think I could be any more excited to read this story! Truly, you descriptions and all the tangible imagery in your writing create such a wonderful vividness to your scenes.

Thank you so much for sharing this with us! I loved it! ❣️

~ Giveaway Time ~

Joana has generously brought with her 3️⃣ beautiful Kindle copies of Twists of Fate for me to giveaway to 3️⃣ lucky readers!

To enter this lovely and generous giveaway, leave a comment, question, or some love for Joana! 💕

• This giveaway is open worldwide.  Thank you, Joana!
• This giveaway ends July 23rd!

If you’d rather not wait, you can pre-order the eBook from Amazon, and it will be delivered to your Kindle on Thursday 22 July.

Other posts on the Twists of Fate blog tour:

17 Jun 2021 ~ Austen Variations ~ Giveaway and Excerpt: A ride in the rain

24 Jun 2021 ~ Austen Variations ~ Ongoing Giveaway and Excerpt: A fiery Mr Darcy

28 Jun 2021 ~ Austenesque Reviews ~ Cover Reveal, Giveaway and Excerpt: A very un-Hunsford-like proposal

5 Jul 2021 ~ Babblings of a Bookworm ~ Giveaway and Guest post: Breaking the wall of silence

8 Jul 2021 ~ From Pemberley to Milton ~ Giveaway and ‘Ask me anything!’ (I’ll try to answer without too many spoilers)

13 Jul 2021 ~ Austen Variations ~ Ongoing Giveaway and Excerpt: If anything can go wrong… (Murphy’s Law ~ the JAFF version)

16 Jul 2021 ~ Austenesque Reviews ~ Giveaway and… [my lips are sealed, but I hope you’ll like it]

22 Jul 2021 ~ Austen Variations ~ Launch Day!

Thanks for following the blog tour and leaving such heart-warming messages! I’m hugely grateful to you all for keeping me writing. Best wishes, everyone, and thanks again, Meredith, for your wonderful welcome and for all the joy and the magic that we’re finding at Austenesque Reviews day after day!

Oh, Joana, thank you! This is such a special treat – you are the one who brought the joy and the magic, my friend! I wish you all the verst best with your new release!! Congratulations!! 🥰