Maggie Blackbird

Today, author Naomi Laeuchli is guesting. She’s talking about her latest release, The Schoolmaster’s Daughter, a Regency romance. Don’t forget to enter the Rafflecopter giveaway.

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The most succinct reason I write regency romance can actually be summed up in a single word: joy. Reading regency romance always brings me a great deal of joy. I love the world these book create. There is an elegance to the time, from the clothes and the balls to country estates, hunting, and rides through the countryside. It paints a world that is elegant, lush, and colorful. I enjoy the manners and polite conversation. People being introduced by a butler or being shown into the parlor. It’s a cozy world to read about, while still having ample opportunities for drama and intriguing character interactions. Characters can have unique stations in life that you don’t find as much in a contemporary story, and these leads to unique combinations of backstory, motivations, and desires.    

I love spending time in that world while reading, and consequently, also while writing. Writing is a unique way to explore a world, building my own stories, forging my own path. It’s like bushwacking your own trail. A wonderful regency romance can be compared to hiking trail that takes you up a gorgeous mountain and shows you a breathtaking view on top. While writing it is forging your own path, off-trail, up that same mountain. It’s not as easy. You’ll probably be scratched. The steep inclines will leave you with some sore muscles. The view at the top is the same…but you reached it in your own way. It was your own unique journey. It might have been hard but it was also fun, and you feel accomplished. Some days you want to follow the trail, and some days you want to bushwack.

And if you bushwack enough, you might find make a trail that others can experience and enjoy. And giving that kind of joy to someone else, is also a great joy in itself.

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Title: The Schoolmaster’s Daughter
Series: N/A
Author: Naomi Laeuchli
Genre: Regency Romance
Length: 234 pages
Release Date: July 19, 2024

Blurb: Deep in debt and desperate for a solution, Julius Claydon knows that marrying a wealthy woman is his only hope. When he meets the beautiful and rich Clara Haughton in Bath, he believes she could be his salvation, but there’s one obstacle in his path: Lydia Cray, Clara’s sharp-witted and penniless companion.

When Lydia quickly sees through his fortune-hunting motives, Julius proposes an alliance. He will help secure her future if she helps him secure Clara’s heart.

But Lydia is not all she appears to be, and she has a plan of her own: to teach him a lesson he won’t soon forget. But her scheming soon leads to unforeseen consequences for them both.

Can love spring from deception?

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He had reached them now and was smiling down at her. “Miss Cray. You look lovely tonight.”

“Thank you.”

She was dimly aware that he was bowing to Clara and greeting her as well. But while he must, in the interests of politeness, have looked away from herself at some point, it didn’t feel like it. It felt as if his eyes never truly left hers. Which made it unmistakable who he was addressing when he asked, “Might I have the pleasure of this dance?”

Later that night she would look back and think it strange that he had asked her to dance before Clara, that he had barely paid Clara more attention than what was demanded by common civility. But now she simply held out her hand to him, beaming at him and nodded, finding words curiously difficult to form.

The music had changed to a waltz as he led her out onto the dance floor. She felt a curious sensation somewhere north of her stomach as his arm wrapped around her waist and he began to lead her.

He truly was graceful, as he smiled down at her and the pair twirled through the steps and the music.

This close, she could see the individual flecks of grey hairs in amongst the dark, which she found strangely endearing. The lines on his face seemed a little deeper under the candlelight and she felt a strange impulse to reach up and run her fingers across them.

His eyes, though, were a clear deep blue, and she suspected they held the exact same youthfulness and brightness that they had had on the day he was born. In some mysterious way, her instincts told her they always would. Those same eyes were smiling down warmly into her own, and she blushed a little but held the gaze steady.

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Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Naomi Laeuchli has lived overseas in nine different countries on three different continents where her family was posted with the American Foreign Service. In November 2012 she moved from the Democratic Republic of the Congo back to the states and currently lives in Arizona with five horses. She works as a freelance writer and part time at the local library. She has written several interactive stories for Choice of Games, Tales, and Dorian.

Follow Naomi: Website

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