Please welcome this week’s Featured Author, Jude Knight. She’s here to tell us about her newest book, Unkept Promises, and how it came to be. Here’s Jude.

My next release has been simmering in the back of my mind for a long time. I wanted to write a story about a child bride whose husband leaves immediately after the wedding, with the love story not starting until years later, when the grown-up wife meets her husband again. It’s an interesting trope, and I wanted to see what I could make with it.

Like all my books, bits gathered around that central idea. The reason for the forced wedding came early on. I fitted the story into my Golden Redepenning series, and making the husband one of the naval officer sons of Lord Henry let me send him of to the Far East.

It’s the fourth book, and as I wrote the first three, Mia (the wife) appeared often enough for me to get to know her quite well. She’d married above herself. She’d felt hopelessly out of place in the Society her new family took for granted. Even her long correspondence with her husband’s mistress, which bewildered her in-laws, popped into my head as I wrote these books.

So writing Mia, when the time came, was easy enough. I had an altogether vaguer impression of Jules, and I knew I had an uphill challenge to make him a character that readers would like. After all, he has abandoned his wife (admittedly on orders, and leaving her to the care of his family), had children by another woman while married, and had other lovers, as well.

My breakthrough came on a long Skype conversation with my friend Carol Roddy, who writes as Caroline Warfield. Once I’d explained to her how he’d come by his mistress (in much the same way as he met his wife, saving Kirana from soldiers and Mia from smugglers), I was on the path to showing the loving, honourable gentleman who lived inside the rogue.

This is my favourite Redepenning novel so far. I hope you’ll enjoy it, too.

Unkept Promises

(Book 4 in The Golden Redepennings series)

She wants to negotiate a comfortable marriage; he wants her in his bed

“… oaths and anchors equally will drag: naught else abides on fickle earth but unkept promises of joy.” Herman Melville

Naval captain Jules Redepenning has spent his adult life away from England, and at war. He rarely thinks of the bride he married for her own protection, and if he does, he remembers the child he left after their wedding seven years ago. He doesn’t expect to find her in his Cape Town home, a woman grown and a lovely one, too.

Mia Redepenning sails to Cape Town to nurse her husband’s dying mistress and adopt his children. She hopes to negotiate a comfortable married life with the man while she’s there. Falling in love is not on her to-do list.

Before they can do more than glimpse a possible future together, their duties force them apart. At home in England, Mia must fight for the safety of Jules’s children. Imprisoned in France, Jules must battle for his self-respect and his life.

Only by vanquishing their foes can they start to make their dreams come true.

For buy links and more information, see:

Jude Knight’s book page https://judeknightauthor.com/books/unkept-promises/

Meet Jude Knight

I write stuff and then try to figure out how to slot the story into a genre category. Historical romantic suspense? Yes, mostly. I’m mad keen on history, enjoy what happens to people in the crucible of a passionate relationship, and love to use a good mystery and some real danger as mechanisms to torture my characters.

I have always loved telling stories, mostly for the benefit of children in need of entertainment, or to amuse myself while waiting (six children mean a lot of waiting), or to continue to live in a book world after I had closed the covers.

I’ve wanted to write novels since I was seven – and did so, twice, before my dearest man and I started producing those children. I was a good enough reader to know I wasn’t a good enough writer, but I figured I’d improve.

Then… life. Two of our children faced major health challenges. We spent hours every day for years in various kinds of physio, occupational and speech therapy, and writing took a back seat. Every time we came up for air, the world shoved us down again, and one day I woke up and realised that my mother, who had always encouraged me, had died without ever seeing one of my books in print.

It was time to fight through my fears of failing, finish a novel and get out there.

In 2014, the first of my strong determined historical heroines, heroes who appreciate them, and villains you’ll love to loathe made their way into the covers of Candle’s Christmas Chair.

Since then, I’ve published seven novels, thirteen novellas and a heap of shorter stories, and plan to keep going till I run out of years. In my other identity as Judy Knighton, I’m a plain language consultant specialising in contracts, insurance policies, and financial disclosure statements. Fiction is more fun.

Website and blog: http://judeknightauthor.com/

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