The Knight’s Substitute Bride

The Knight’s Substitute Bride
Could the wrong bride…

Be right for him after all!

For the sake of his family name, Lord Robert must marry to seal an alliance with an Irish clan. Only, the woman at the altar isn’t who he was promised! Instead, it’s her sister, Lady Mairenn! The sharp-tongued Irish beauty is as reluctant to wed as Robert, but as friction turns to fire between them, she’s further derailing Robert’s plans for this purely pragmatic arrangement…

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This extract is from early on in the book when Lord Robert de Brunville first encounters Mairenn Ní Tiernan in local woods.
Neither is aware of whom the other is…

He purposely stepped on a twig and cleared his throat, attempting to gain the maid’s attention but nothing…she was not diverted and continued, instead, to murmur sweet nothings to the mare, her hands brushing down the animal’s long neck, soothing it. So, he tried again coughing a little louder, yielding, nevertheless, the same result.
‘If you are trying to gain my attention, may I suggest that you do so without the need to splutter and expectorate. I oft find it unbecoming.’
His jaw dropped a little taking in the absurdity of what she had said. ‘Do you? Interesting…’
‘How so? I cannot imagine why that would be deemed interesting.’ She frowned, still keeping her eyes fixed to her task of rubbing down the mare.
His lips twitched at the corners. ‘By interesting, I mean my sudden appearance here has not seemed to perturb or ruffle you in any a manner, when I would naturally assume it would. And that you, a maid alone here, would still chastise a stranger, a man immensely larger than yourself, for the way he attempted to then alert you of his forementioned arrival.’
The impudent woman had still not lifted her head to even acknowledge him.
‘Well firstly, I would say that your presence is not as unexpected as you assume since I believed that this magnificent creature would rightly belong to someone and that its owner would soon come and claim her. And here you are.’
‘Yes.’ Robert could not resist his lips from curling into a smile. Something that he was quite unused to. ‘Here I am.’
It was this innocuous comment that finally made the maiden look up and gaze at him from the top of his head down to his boots and then back again. Even though he felt exposed and unnerved by the woman’s perusal, he could not help the jolt of desire that flared through his body. Damn, but this was strange, indeed quite an odd sensation given that the maid was a mere small slip of a woman with common enough features; her hair from what he could see covered by the hood of her brat was not flaxen or brown but somewhere in between. And her eyes were seemingly unremarkable from where he stood. Not that he would get closer to quell his curiosity. But there was something ethereal and actually a little remarkable about the maid that warmed the blood in his veins. It might be the way she was looking straight at him or the scent of the woman; of lavender and of something else, something far more that was so enticing.
He felt annoyance at himself. It was likely that his not having been with a woman for so long made even this one appear as alluring as she did.
‘Yes, so you are now here. I would add that I did disfavour your attempt at gaining my notice. Making an announcement would have been far better than coughing inanely.’
Robert did not know whether he was amused or appalled by this strange woman and her brazen manner. ‘Apologies, but could it be that I had not wanted to alarm you?’
Since I had expected someone to come for the horse, it was quite unnecessary.’ She shrugged, sighing deeply, as though this whole conversation was somehow tiring. ‘But now you know our ways, I rather doubt you would make the same mistake again.’
He blinked in surprise. ‘Your ways?’
‘Indeed, I could tell even without looking up that you were foreign in our lands.’
‘I am, yes.’
She looked him up and down, nodding. ‘Anglo-Norman, I would say and from the look of you, I would surmise that you are a stable hand or squire, out riding his master’s new horse.’
A damn stable hand? A squire?
She grinned. ‘I am right, am I not? But you should take the mare back in case your master were to find the horse missing and flog you for your mistake.’
The fact that this woman would take him for a squire made him realise that she knew very little of his Anglo-Norman customs. For one, he was far too old to be anyone’s damn squire or, God forbid, a stable hand.
‘You would be right but not about what you have uttered.”
She glanced in his direction and raised an insolent brow. ‘Oh, and what have I been wrong about?’
Never in all his life had anyone ever dared to speak to him the way this impudent young sprite had. But then again, no one had ever mistaken him for a mere squire either. And for all his annoyance at being thought so lowly, Robert found this not only to be amusing but somehow liberating. It was as though all the burden of being his late father’s son, and the obligation and duty foisted on him from the day he was born, had all but faded away—well, even if were just for a short time. In truth, Robert found that he liked being mistaken for someone he was not.

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Melissa Oliver is from south-west London where she writes sweeping historical romance and is the winner of The Romantic Novelists’ Association’s Joan Hessayon Award for new writers 2020 for her debut, The Rebel Heiress and the Knight.