The Debutante's Dilemma

by Elyse Mady

Overview

One woman in search of passion

Miss Cecilia Hastings has achieved what every young lady hopes for during her first London season...in duplicate! She's caught the eye of not one but two of England's most eligible bachelors. Both Jeremy Battersley, Earl of Henley, and Richard Huxley, Duke of Wexford, are handsome, wealthy and kind, the epitome of proper gentlemen. But Cecilia doesn't want proper, she wants passion. So she issues a challenge to her suitors: a kiss, so that she may choose between them.

Two men in love with the same woman

Friends since childhood, and compatriots on the battlefields of Spain, Jeremy and Richard have found that falling for the same woman has set them at odds and risks destroying their friendship forever. But a surprising invitation to a late-night garden tryst soon sets them on a course that neither of them could have anticipated. And these gentlemen quickly discover that love can take many forms...

22,000 words

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781426890734
Publisher:	Carina Press
Publication date:	04/15/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	99
File size:	825 KB

About the Author

An enthusiastic and voracious reader from a young age of everything from obscure eighteenth-century novels to misplaced cereal boxes, Elyse has worked as a freelance writer for the past several years for many of the leading sewing and craft magazines in North America.

The Debutante's Dilemma is her first work of fiction. She is also working on a number of contemporary romance manuscripts as well as a full-length historical romance novel set in the 1780s.

In addition to her writing commitments, Elyse also teaches film and literature at a local college. In her free time she enjoys (well, enjoys might be too strong a word—perhaps pursues with dogged determination would be better) never ending renovations on the century cottage she shares with her intrepid husband and two boys in Hamilton, Ontario.

With her excellent writerly imagination, she one day dreams of topping the New York Times bestseller list and reclaiming her pre-kid body without the bother of either sit-ups or the denunciation of ice cream.

Read an Excerpt

London, 1814

Miss Cecilia Hastings was the luckiest girl who had ever lived to draw breath.

This was the near-universal assessment of the five hundred guests who found themselves crushed into Lady Stanhope's lavish ballroom like so many potted fish on this early June evening.

That the young lady was well-favoured, with a tall, even figure, a smooth throat and milk-white skin, striking grey eyes and dark chestnut hair, there was no doubt. Just eighteen, Miss Hastings was everywhere lauded for her calm manners and her unerring ability to navigate London's treacherous social shoals while appearing neither missish nor imperious. She danced divinely. She both sang and played the pianoforte. She could read Italian and spoke French beautifully. She befriended those wealthy and modest, with equal disregard for their particular standings. Her sartorial sense was unmatched and her dresser had been offered no less than a half-dozen bribes if she would but reveal the secrets to her mistress's beauty regime.

But there was no doubt that Miss Hastings's most particular and celebrated feature had been her ability—in this, her first London Season—to attract not one, but two, of the most eligible bachelors in England as suitors to her hand.

Single, handsome, titled heirs, educated at Cambridge, related to some of the oldest families in the country, and possessors of estates that would make the most hardened steward weep for joy. Each with a splendid house in town, their family seats—in Kent and Sussex, respectively—marvels of country grandeur and, crowning joy of crowning joy, each able to avail himself of a clear £30,000 a year.

In a word, that which every young woman—and her mama—aspired to with a fierce and competitive single-mindedness during the whole course of the Season from January to June, Miss Hastings had achieved in duplicate without seeming to discompose a single hair on her perfectly coiffed head.

Of course, there were some of her immediate peers, girls who had not met with such unmatched reception, who thought this excess smacked of matrimonial gluttony and behind her back took a savage delight in criticizing her faults, real or imagined. But to her face, they were all smiles and compliments, begging, in their most gracious voices, to have Miss Hastings share her secrets for winding her turban à la turque or to solicit a recommendation for the name of her mantua maker.

The knowledge that both gentlemen had made handsome presentations to Miss Hastings's gratified father in advance of their declarations to the lady herself was in such widespread circulation that any repetition of the fact elicited the merest murmur of acknowledgement by its weary listeners, so shop-worn had that particular social nugget become in the retelling. Now, as the Season wound its way to another overstuffed and over-heated conclusion, the single most pressing question in the minds of nearly everyone who had made an appearance in the Stanhopes' crowded ballroom on this warm summer night was which of the two gentlemen Miss Hastings would ultimately accept.