Go now and get as many books as your heart desires!
LINK: romancebookworms.com
or
https://books2read.com/u/3LN6X1
Friday, June 20, 2025
Today is the day for a wealth of free books for your reader! Go now! IF I LOVED YOU is one of the gifts!
Monday, June 16, 2025
Hot reviews for LORD FOURNIER'S SHAMELESS PRINCESS!
BUY LINK: https://books2read.com/u/boxvz1 |
I hope you are reading this series which is getting so many readers' happy reviews! As one reader said of them, they are " not your average ballroom romance."
Try one and read them all for excitement, charm and the drama of falling in love with the one person who makes your life complete!
“…a fairy tale romance with lots of intrigue, danger and mysterious happenings.”
“…[I was} swept into the lives of those whose lives were in peril as Napoleon began his attempt to conquer Europe. The research is superb.”
“The attraction between the main characters sizzles…”
“An exciting, captivating, and well written historical romance with such beautiful historical detail. The drama, action, intrigue, suspense, and so many emotional issues, and plot twists that kept me very entertained.”
Friday, June 6, 2025
Change: It's what's for breakfast, lunch and dinner!
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| Pix of me in Amboise, with River Loire in background. Ready to tour! |
Change. (A discussion and questions for you, dear readers.)We often think of change as major life events. A birth. A death. Marriage. Divorce. Moving to a new house or town.
But lately as in the past three years, I’ve begun to think of change as something subtle. The passing of years. The growth of grandchildren from 6 to 10. Their emerging personalities as they turn 12. How I look to myself in the mirror. How my husband stands now, his marathoning days so many decades behind him. Our changing preferences in foods.
Of course, the minor stroke I had in 2021 affected my feeling of invincibility. I had often talked (rejoiced) about the fact that I had made it to 77 without any daily meds.
Then in December ’23, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. The surgery and treatment for that was intense. But frankly, they caught it early and my treatment was brief, even though now I see the team of oncologiests about every 3 months.
But something else changed in my writing. Having started daily wriiting when I was 33, with 2 babies and 1 toddler to love, I began to notice forty-odd years later that I wanted to write more. That I wanted it to mean SOMETHING. Not just my own satisfaction. Not just income. Not just the joy of writing romance, or solving a mystery. But as something of value that lasted longer than the hero’s last kiss…or the heroine’s renewal on life.
After all my years in undergrad and grad school, all the years researching every kind of history from that of the use of salt (really!) to the quarry where stones came from to go into Parisian mansions, I wanted something more from me. Something more for the reader.
What emerged was my desire to write a series that bridged the description of historical romance and historical ficiton. I wanted substance for me and for the reader who liked the past as backdrop but who, I thought, needed more to appreciate the problems. What resulted was my current series of romantic suspense, SCARLETT AFFAIRS. Here what I have poured into those plots is the very factual background of the years in which the world fought the attempt of Napoleon Bonaparte to rule over it.
I’ve picked one major event or conflict in each year that occurred, from 1802 through 1816, long after he had gone to St. Helena. Go here to start or continue:
https://amzn.to/4clTGvi.
Something else began to eat at me too. That I could not write as fast as I had before. (And the emphasis on keeping up sales, we authors are told, is to put out books as fast as possible.) Truly, that is not me.
I digress!
But now I have begun to fiddle with a new new new idea. Romansy which is romance with fantasy and time travel, maybe a bit of paranormal shifting or witches or faes thrown in, is a new concept in plotting.
I’d say it is popular because real life these days demands something a wildly supernatural to counter the feroiciosly supernatural events in our daily lives.
So now we come to you. And here are my questions:
Have you experienced great change in your life lately? How are you dealing with that?
Do you see minor changes in your body (grey hair, indigestion, sagging interest in old delights, new interests in cards, conasta, bowling, etc) that you have dealt with or not?
Do you still read as much as you did before those changes, big or small? Do you read the same things, fiction, romance, mystery, whatever?
What have you read lately—fiction or non—that thrilled you or disturbed you?
Talk to me. I want to hear about the changes in your life.
Wednesday, May 21, 2025
Oh, to be the portrait painter of the kings and queens of all of Europe! She's in my next book!
Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (16 April 1755 – 30 March 1842) traveled Europe after she fled Paris during the Revolution. Known even before she left as the woman who portrayed Marie Antoinette in her boudoir wit her children, Le Brun had also painted many Frenchmen and woman and those who traveled to Versailles.
She feared returning to France during the upheavals of governments and traveled freely in the UK and on the Continent. She never learned English, but so many spoke French in many countries that she got along in a smattering of German and Russian.
She painted the portraits of Alexander I of Russia and his wife, Alexandra. Other portraits were of women and men in Lichtenstein, Bavaria, Belgium and England. Her price was approximately 1,000 British pounds in 1805.
She visited Brighton in the summer of 1805 and I have included her in LORD CARLISLE'S ENTICING LURE, debuting in August 2025!
Marie-Antoinette and her children 1787. Versailles.
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| Madame du Barry, portrait by Le Brun. |
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| Comte de Vaudreuil, portrait by Le Brun. He was for a short period Le Brun's lover. |
Saturday, May 17, 2025
2 Ladies from Baden. 2 arranged marriages. 2 unions gone wrong!
Here first is Stéphanie von Baden, niece of Josephine, whom Bonaparte adopted so that he could wed her to a ruler who was an ally of France. She became Grand Duchess Stéphanie von Baden (1789–1860), out living her husband.
They lived apart in the beginning of their marriage, but came together to have five children, three daughters and two sons. Both boys died in childhood.
Stephanie lived in Mannheim after her husband's death.
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Elizabeth Alexeievna—or as she was known at birth, Louise von Baden—was the eldest daughter of the duke of Baden and therefore the sister-in-law of Stephanie, the Grand Duchess. She was considered the loveliest woman in Europe and many wished to marry her. Bonaparte thought of it himself but this was early in his role as Emperor and had not yet divorced Josephine.
Louise married the Tsarevich, Alexander, who later became Alexander I, emperor of Russia. They had no children.
In 1802 Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun painted this portrait of her. (Le Brun who lived in many countries after she fled Paris and the Terror, painted many rulers of Europe.)
Sunday, May 4, 2025
Saturday, April 19, 2025
Thursday, April 17, 2025
LIE DOWN WITH A LYON for a First Kiss! A nibble now! Debuts 4.30.25
Copyright 2025, Cerise DeLand. All rights reserved.
He stepped around her, his height and breadth a barrier between her and the wind. He lifted her chin. His tormented gaze deepened to a river of regret as the gathering clouds blocked out the sun. Catching her wrists, he pressed the palms of her hands to the flat of his chest. Beneath her flesh, his own pounded. “If I could, I would marry one woman.”
She could not bear to ask if that lady was her. Oh, but she could hope. “What deters you?”
“She and I are star-crossed.”
“Can that chasm not be bridged?”
He brought her hands up to his lips, and the journey they took began with the press of his lips to one wrist, then the other. “No,” he rasped. “She is not mine to have.”
“How…how do you know?”
He opened one palm and licked the skin. She trembled at his ardor.
“She wants, she deserves, more than I can give her.”
“Sometimes,” she ventured, caught between desire and propriety, “love can grant more to a relationship than circumstances provide.” She had no knowledge of that, no understanding. She had heard it whispered among her childhood friends in Crawford’s school, or read of it in books that were in essence fairytales for adults.
He hooded his eyes as he bent and nipped the pad of one thumb, then the other. His lips stirred fresh, hot hunger in her blood.
She threw back her head, her eyes squeezed shut. “Please stop.”
He circled her waist with both arms and pulled her against him. His lips in her hair, he whispered, “I can’t.”
’Twas then she threw all caution to the windy afternoon, reached up, and caught his cheeks. Sliding up against the bulwark of his fabulous body, she put her lips to his.
No man had she ever kissed. She knew not how, exactly. But in that moment, instinct was her guide and she took his lips, parted from him, and took them again. He groaned and crushed his mouth on hers. Heaven, at once, appeared before her.
He was fierce in his claim. Ravenous. His arms were iron, his lips a brand, his tongue a fierce probe she met with a cry of delight. He’d said he was not married. He was gentle, persuasive—an animal who took and gave. He’d said he could not marry because the one he desired was so different. But in the command of his kiss, the claim of his tongue, the groan from his throat, he declared how he wanted her.
She believed him. His fierce possession of her. His words.
And she let him have her. All of her. Her lips, her teeth, her heart. How could he not want to claim her? She wanted all of him!
He broke their kiss.
She gasped for air and marveled at the look on his face.
He was enchanted—torn and furious. He cupped her shoulders. His voice a rasp, he said, “I must go.”
Dazed, she let him steady her on her feet. Insulted, heartbroken, she fought for sanity. He would leave her? After this? Was he a fool?
BUY LINK: https://books2read.com/u/bWa8n7
Saturday, April 12, 2025
Smashing 5++ STARS review of LORD FOURNIER'S SHAMELESS PRINCESS: "Intoxicating!"
Please read!
It is here: https://www.nnlightsbookheaven.com/post/lord-fournier-s-shameless-princess-br
5++ stars for Lord Fournier's Shameless Princess: A Regency Historical Romance (Scarlett Affairs Book 4) by Cerise DeLand #bookreview #regency #historicalromance
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