The Reluctant Wife by Caroline Warfield

Today I have the great pleasure of hosting the talented Caroline Warfield and her new release! Just feast your eyes on that cover would you!! Be sure to check out her interview below and enter the giveaway 🙂

The Reluctant Wife

Children of Empire, Book 2

Genre: Pre Victorian, Historical Romance

Heat rating: 3 of 5 (two brief -mild- sexual encounters)

ISBN: pending

Page count: 275 pages

Pub date: April 26, 2017

Long Blurb

When all else fails, love succeeds…

Captain Fred Wheatly’s comfortable life on the fringes of Bengal comes crashing down around him when his mistress dies, leaving him with two children he never expected to have to raise. When he chooses justice over army regulations, he’s forced to resign his position, leaving him with no way to support his unexpected family. He’s already had enough failures in his life. The last thing he needs is an attractive, interfering woman bedeviling his steps, reminding him of his duties.

All widowed Clare Armbruster needs is her brother’s signature on a legal document to be free of her past. After a failed marriage, and still mourning the loss of a child, she’s had it up to her ears with the assumptions she doesn’t know how to take care of herself, that what she needs is a husband. She certainly doesn’t need a great lout of a captain who can’t figure out what to do with his daughters. If only the frightened little girls didn’t need her help so badly.

Clare has made mistakes in the past. Can she trust Fred now? Can she trust herself? Captain Wheatly isn’t ashamed of his aristocratic heritage, but he doesn’t need his family and they’ve certainly never needed him. But with no more military career and two half-caste daughters to support, Fred must turn once more—as a failure—to the family he let down so often in the past. Can two hearts rise above past failures to forge a future together?

Find it here: http://amzn.to/2oAo00p

 Short Blurb

When Bengal Army Captain Fred Wheatly, a disgraced soldier with more honor than sense, is forced to resign, and his mistress dies leaving him with two half-caste daughters to raise, he reluctantly turns to Clare Armbruster for help. But the interfering, heastrong widow demands more of him than he’s ready to give. He’s failed so often in the past. Clare’s made mistakes as well. Can two hearts rise above past failures to forge a future together?

When all else fails, love succeeds…

About Caroline Warfield

Traveler, poet, librarian, technology manager—award winning author Caroline Warfield has been many things (even a nun), but above all she is a romantic. Having retired to the urban wilds of eastern Pennsylvania, she reckons she is on at least her third act, happily working in an office surrounded by windows while she lets her characters lead her to adventures in England and the far-flung corners of the British Empire. She nudges them to explore the riskiest territory of all, the human heart.

Caroline is a RONE award winner and has five star reviews from Readers’ Favorite, Night Owl Reviews, and InD’Tale. She is also a member of the writers’ co-operative, the Bluestocking Belles. With partners she manages and regularly writes for both The Teatime Tattler and History Imagined.

Website http://www.carolinewarfield.com/

Amazon Author http://www.amazon.com/Caroline-Warfield/e/B00N9PZZZS/

Good Reads http://bit.ly/1C5blTm

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/carolinewarfield7

Twitter @CaroWarfield

Email warfieldcaro@gmail.com

Giveaway

Caroline is sponsoring a grandprize in celebration of her release. You can entere it here: http://www.carolinewarfield.com/2017blogtourpackage/

The prequel to this book, A Dangerous Nativity, is always **FREE**. You can get a copy here: http://www.carolinewarfield.com/bookshelf/a-dangerous-nativity-1815/

Excerpt

Get control of yourself, Clare, a small part of her brain urged, dimly aware that exhaustion and relief made her foolish. She didn’t care. Just that moment his arms around her back and his shoulder firm beneath her cheek felt solid. Safe. Dependable.

“Easy, easy. It’s only a tent,” he soothed, one hand making gentle circles on her back.

“You thought about us. No one ever—” He had looked after her, she realized, from the moment he found her at the inn in Calcutta comforting his children. No man ever took care for my comfort before.

She took a shuddering breath. Dependable? This is Fred Wheatly holding you, the man who— She didn’t remember what just then. She felt his kiss on her head, then her ear.

She raised her head and his mouth came down on hers. The gentle kiss made no demands, forced no response, and asked only trust. No man had ever kissed her like that. She couldn’t resist him. When he withdrew to look down at her, she closed the distance and kissed him back, tasting sweat, sand, and male.

“Papa? Are we there?”

He broke off the kiss and tipped his forehead to hers, silent laugher rocking him. “We have come to a place. That much is certain,” he responded. Clare didn’t think he referred to the way station.

Author Interview

Caroline: Thanks so much for having me today, and for asking me these challenging questions! I’ll do my best to answer them.

Mandy: I’m thrilled to be chatting with you!

Q: If you were not a writer what else would you like to have done?

A: I was in college majoring in East Asian studies with an eye to a career in the Foreign Service when marriage intervened. My dreams changed, but even then writing lay deep in my soul. I always knew I’d return to it. I ended up with a long and satisfying career in public libraries and the information industry. Now I write full time.

Q: Are there any particular authors or books that have really inspired you?

A: Harper Lee, Mark Twain, Thomas B. Costain, Charlotte Bronte, Louisa May Alcott, and Pearl Buck were among my formative influences. As a teen I fell in love with the books of Dorothy Dunnett. She fired my imagination more than anyone ever has. Elizabeth Peters and Mary Stewart delighted me later. My go-to romance writers are Mary Balogh, Grace Burrowes, and Carla Kelly.

Q: Tell us a bit about your new release. Where did your inspiration for it come from?

A: The Reluctant Wife is Book 2 of a series. I had written a holiday novella, A Dangerous Nativity, about the hero’s older sister. Two brothers and a cousin appear in that one as boys intent on creating, amusingly enough, an all-animal nativity to the horror of the adults. I wondered what would happen to them as adults. The result was a new series in which each is the hero of his own book. At the beginning of Book 1 they were on three different continents, driven there by lies and deceit as much as by ambition and curiosity. I had to help each of them find their way home.

Q: What was the hardest part about writing it?

A: The hardest part is always getting to the hero’s inner core. What, deep down, is broken and needs to change? How will he recognize it? What will drive change? If I can figure that out early, I can drive the novel forward. In Fred’s case it is a sense that he has failed to protect his family in the past; that they are better off without him. It isn’t true, but he needs to see it for himself.

Q: Who’s your favorite character in it? (I know, I know, favoritism!)

A: The story opens with the hero facing the fact that he has been left with two half-caste daughters to raise on his own when his mistress dies. He has no clue what to do with them. In the course of writing the book I came to love the older one, Meghal, a precocious six year old. She pushes him to do what’s right when he is not sure what that is. She isn’t about to let him foist her care off onto his sister. She wants her Papa and will follow him anywhere.

Q: Why should we run out and buy it right now?

A: The story sweeps the reader from the edge of Bengal to Calcutta to the Suez and across the desert, to rural England while two people stumble into love in spite of themselves. It includes a meteor shower, steamboats, herbal remedies, and camels. The heroine is a courageous wounded duck. The hero is a clueless male with more honor than sense, who never stops trying to do the right thing. (Imagine his shock when he realizes people actually depend on him!) The villain, a vile man, makes the hero miserable in both India and England, but the hero defeats him—with a little help from family—in the end. The girls are utterly charming.

Q: Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?

A: Family may be messy and difficult, but it matters. At the end of the day we all need one another.

Q: Do you have a support network outside of your family members?

A: I couldn’t function without friends. I am particularly dependent on old friends from Central Ohio Fiction Writers who like to call themselves Great Escape Artists, and on the Bluestocking Belles, my online tribe. One kept me writing until I got it right and the other helps me survive promotion and marketing.

Q: Do you travel much concerning your book(s)?

A: Never enough! I have not been to India or Suez, as featured in the current one, but I’ve written two books just because I had been somewhere and wanted to use it as a setting. I once asked, “Can I write a Regency novel set in Rome?” Dangerous Secrets was the result. I’ve written others because I long to go there. The current one is an example of that. After I finished The Renegade Wife (Book 1 of the series) I went to Canada just to see the Rideau Canal for myself.

Q: What are you afraid of?

A: Boredom. Thank goodness for e-readers. I used to fear being caught somewhere without enough to read. I would fly with a backpack full of books.

Q: What TV shows/films do you enjoy watching?

A: British crime dramas are my favorites. I adored Foyle’s War and Granchester. I’m pretty much a sucker for any costume drama such as North and South, Poldark, Call the Midwife, or, of course, Downton Abbey. Notice they are all historical, but I am not picky about period. I had trouble with Outlander, mostly because I would rather not watch graphic violence.

Mandy: Wow! What great answers. Thank you so much for stopping by Musing by Mandy and please come hang out again soon 🙂