I have another confession to make.
I'm a just a little bit obsessed with the hero from A Risque Resolution. He has been, without a doubt, one of my favorites to bring to life which is funny, because of all my hero's (Henry, Stephen, Devlin, Gavin... the list goes on) he is most definitely the hardest to love.
Plagued with personal demons, Captain James Rigby has returned from the war a changed man... and not for the better. He's lost his arm, and with it his sense of pride and self worth. His parents are both dead, and the only other person in the world he loves - his younger sister, Natalie - is terrified of him for reasons she refuses to explain.
It will take a strong woman to help him heal. A woman just like Lily Kincaid, the feisty brunette who helped bring Sarah and Devlin together in The Winter Wish. But is Lily strong enough to help a man who doesn't want to help himself?
I guess you'll just have to wait until November 5th to find out, when A Risque Resolution will be released on Amazon and Barnes & Noble! Until then, enjoy a short excerpt (the first of three).
A RISQUE RESOLUTION - CHAPTER TWO EXCERPT
Captain
James Rigby, formerly of the second company in the eighth British battalion,
was done fighting. Had been done, if truth be told, for the past two years, but
it wasn’t until his arm was severed from his body that he was officially
declared unfit for duty and sent home to England.
Losing
a limb was a funny thing, James reflected as he sat in his study and stared
blindly out the window at the darkening sky. He’d watched the doctor cut it off
himself. Watched the bastard hack away at the rotting flesh and bone with all the
finesse of a butcher while he drifted in and out of consciousness.
It
had taken three men to pin him down on the table. A fourth to force his jaw
open and pour the morphine down. Even now, five months removed, he could still
taste it, just as he could still feel his arm. Except when he glanced down to the
left there was nothing there save a coat sleeve tucked up and neatly pinned
under.
He
closed his eyes, replaying the bloody memory that still haunted him day and
night. A memory he wished he could cut away as easily as the doctor had cut
away his arm.
James’
remaining hand curled into a tight fist of frustration that pounded uselessly
against the top of his desk, shaking papers and sending a glass figurine
toppling over the edge. He waited for the figurine to break. Waited for it to
break, as he was broken. Waited for it to shatter, as he was shattered.
But
the glass remained intact, and the irony that such a delicate thing could
survive a fall unharmed while he, a strong, strapping man of only twenty seven
had been reduced to little more than a cripple, did not escape his notice.
He
wanted to curse. He wanted to cry. He wanted to shout to high heavens about how
bloody unfair it all was, but he knew
once he started he might never stop, and so he bottled up the self pity and the
anger and the emotion and buried it in a place so dark it could not help but
fade into oblivion.
His
heart.
