I find the modern-day tabloids almost impossible to read. I glance at the headlines while waiting in the supermarket line and usually think either, “What a load of garbage,” or “How can they be so unkind to {insert name of celebrity}?” Sometimes, I actually get back out of line to read an article—but that’s rare.
But when it comes to fiction, I find the Regency equivalent – the caricature – fascinating. Maybe it’s because those unkind cuts happened two hundred years ago, so they don’t hurt anyone anymore. Or maybe it’s because being rich, famous, and always in danger of mockery and even ruin make such good story fodder for historical romance.
Lots of people must read the tabloids, or they wouldn’t appear week after week on the supermarket shelves. It was the same back then. The rich would buy the latest caricatures; the poorer classes would gaze at them in a print shop window, with the written parts explained by anyone who could read.
In my new novella, To Rescue or Ravish?, the heroine faces scandal, mockery, ruin—and caricature—when she runs from an unwanted marriage. She doesn’t get away scot-free, but she does have a happy ending. :)
Do you read the tabloids? Why or why not? Do you think celebrities should be left alone, or are they fair game? Are most of the stories about them true, false, a combination of the two, truth with a twisted spin, or what...?
To Rescue or Ravish? is available now from Harlequin, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble. I have a free download to give away to someone who comments on this blog.
When heiress Arabella Wilbanks flees a forced betrothal in the middle of the night, the last person she expects to find at the reins of her getaway hackney is Matthew Worcester. It’s been seven long years since they gave in to their mutual desires and shared the most incredible night of their lives, but Matthew still burns with regret for leaving her without a word. He should escort her to safety, but the chance to reclaim and ravish her once more is proving impossible to resist!
Here's an excerpt:
London, January 1802
Arabella rapped hard on the roof of the coach. It lurched around a corner into darkness broken only by the glimmer of the hack’s carriage lamps and stopped.
She put down the window. “How far are we from Bunbury Place?”
The jarvey got down from the box and slouched against the coach, a nonchalant shape with an impertinent voice. “Not far, love. Changed your mind, have you?”
“I have not changed my mind. I am merely asking for information.” She put her hand through the window, proffering the guinea. “I trust this suffices. Kindly open the door and point me in the right direction. I shall walk the rest of the way.”
He didn’t take the coin. After a brief, horrid silence during which she concentrated on thinking of him as the jarvey and not her once-and-never-again lover, he said, “Can’t do that.”
“I beg your pardon?” She pushed on the door, but he had moved forward to block it.
“It’s not safe for a lady alone at night. This, er, Number Seventeen, Bunbury Place—it’s where you live, is it?”
How dare he? “Where I live is none of your business.” She shrank away from the door and kept her hood well over her face.
“So it’s not where you live. Who does live there, then?”
Why couldn’t she have just told him that yes, she lived there? Must every man in the entire country try to order her about? “Let me out at once.”
“Sorry, love. When I rescue a lady from deathly peril, I see her home safe and sound.”
Some shred of common sense deep inside her told her this was extraordinarily kind of him, but it made her want to slap his craggy, insolent face. Home wasn’t safe for her anymore. Nowhere was safe, and meanwhile Matthew Worcester was playing stupid games.
“Cat got your tongue?”
She exploded. “Damn you, Matthew! Stop playing at being a jarvey. It makes me positively ill.”
There was another ghastly silence. It stretched and stretched. Good God, what if he actually was a jarvey? Surely he hadn’t come down that far in the world. A different shame—a valid one—swelled inside her.
“You recognized me,” he said at last. “What a surprise.”
***
To find out about my other Regency novellas, please visit my website at www.BarbaraMonajem.com
