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    Rivals
    Rivals
    Rivals
    Ebook56 pages43 minutes

    Rivals

    By Victoria Fox

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    About this ebook


    Emily Windermere, darling of British film, has a starring role in the summer's hottest regency drama – but it's her scandalous affair off–screen that's set to raise temperatures.

    Cast as the dowdy maid yet again, Julia Chambers has lived her whole life in Emily's shadow. But when her rival tries to take the one thing Julia holds dear, it's payback time.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers Australia
    Release dateApr 1, 2012
    ISBN9781460804506
    Rivals
    Author

    Victoria Fox

    By day I live in London. By night I relax in my fantasy LA mansion, sipping Krug in a Jacuzzi and watching a bare-chested man clean out my pool. I was born in 1983, went to boarding school in my teens and studied English at university. While there, I wrote my first (unpublished) bonkbuster: The Hardest Part. It had lots of sex in it and not a great deal else. Suffice to say that after a rambunctious beginning it was over disappointingly quickly. Despite this, the genre never lost its sheen. I want to write bonkbusters with swagger; rude, racy and irreverent reads that reignite the glory days of Collins and Cooper. Plenty of sex, bags of scandal and a host of outrageous players who keep us up long after lights-out. A long-time admirer of Jackie Collins, I often wondered what life would be like as a bonkbuster author. After working in publishing for a few years, I decided to quit and find out - and I haven't looked back since . . . Hollywood Sinners is my first novel. Victoria loves to hear from her readers via her email: [email protected]

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      Book preview

      Rivals - Victoria Fox

      Chapter One

      ‘It’s unbearably bloody hot. Can someone get me a drink before I burst into flames?’

      Emily Windermere fanned herself with small, porcelain hands, gazing whimsically upon her beauty in the make-up girl’s mirror. Even when she was roasting beneath layers of net and taffeta, trussed up in a bodice and choked by a necklace of ribbons, her wide-eyed reflection—those pools of hazel bordered by delicate lashes; that thicket of copper framing a flawless, cream-skinned complexion—remained as serenely lovely as an English garden on the first day of spring.

      It was the English summer that was the problem.

      ‘Ugh! Wasps!’ Irritably Emily batted her arms, causing the make-up girl’s brush to stab her in the eye. ‘My God, is it too much to hope I’m not blind by the end of this?’

      ‘Here you go, Ms Windermere.’ A nervous runner was proffering a glass of cloudy lemonade, one of the onset requisites stipulated by her management.

      ‘That’ll explain why I’m getting mauled by insects,’ she complained, accepting it all the same. ‘Can’t we take care of this inside my trailer?’

      ‘I need the light, I’m afraid,’ said the make-up girl through gritted teeth.

      It was Friday morning, a fortnight into filming, and, contrary to the studio’s concerns that a London June wouldn’t produce enough light, they now had rather too much of it. The city was enduring a heatwave that showed no signs of abating, golden sun blazing across Hampstead Heath from an unbroken swimming-pool sky. Cast were sweating through Victorian petticoats and frock coats, while crew chased to allay the disgruntled company, struggling under clipboards and sound equipment and taking occasional refuge for a cigarette in the shelter of a crisp white parasol.

      ‘They’re ready for you,’ prompted the runner, anxiously smiling as Emily rose with majesty from her seat, mustering her lacy skirts and, with a dainty finger, removing the spot of perspiration that had gathered in her philtrum.

      She thought of Christopher Fenwick awaiting her in his breeches.

      ‘And I’m ready for them,’ she breathed.

      ‘Oh, Lord Ackland, we mustn’t! Your dear wife—’

      ‘Why relinquish such precious moments to the folly of resistance?’ Lord Ackland growled, attacking his lover’s neck with the ferocity of a vampire. ‘I’ve caught your shy glances, Lucinda; well aware you are of how I admire thee.’

      Lord Ackland’s hands, wide and strong as a bear’s, roamed across her corseted body with the territorial claim of that same animal, deftly unpicking the ties that held her together. His tongue shot into her mouth, rich with tobacco.

      ‘My lord, we act in haste—’

      Abruptly Lord Ackland stepped back, releasing his flap-fronted trousers as the camera panned to Lucinda’s fey, lips-parted stare. She could see him bulging through the cotton and struggled to remember what came next. Fortunately it was his line.

      ‘The heart hastens unchecked, my dear; it knows not the temperance of reason.’

      She’d seen it all before, of course, and as Christopher Fenwick grasped Emily Windermere’s bottom, thrusting a hardness towards her that was most definitely not part of the script, she fought the urge to reach for him in the way she had the previous night and have him surrender to her dexterity right here against the grandfather clock.

      ‘You almost had me back there, you minx,’ Christopher said to her afterwards as they walked up to camp. He couldn’t resist checking over his shoulder to make sure they were out of earshot. ‘We should be more careful.’

      ‘Conscience, all of a sudden?’ Emily enquired archly, absorbing her co-star’s profile out of the corner of her eye: he had a prominent forehead, appealingly like a caveman

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