"I’ve Got My Duke to Keep Me Warm"

Kelly Bowen grew up in Manitoba, Canada. She worked her way through her teenage years as a back country trail guide and ranch hand and spent a year working on a cattle station in Australia. She attended the University of Manitoba and earned a Master of Science degree in veterinary physiology and endocrinology.

But it was Bowen's infatuation with history and a weakness for a good love story that led her down the path of historical romance. When she is not writing, she seizes every opportunity to explore ruins and battlefields.

Currently, Bowen lives in Winnipeg with her husband and two boys, all of whom are wonderfully patient with the writing process. Except, that is, when they need a goalie for street hockey.

Bowen applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, I've Got My Duke to Keep Me Warm, and reported the following:

I’ve Got My Duke to Keep Me Warm introduces readers to the linchpin of my series: the formidable Dowager Duchess of Worth, who the ton believes is slipping—rather oddly— into her dotage. But beneath the dowager’s loopy veneer lurks the chief strategist of a covert network comprised of reformed criminals and con artists. Their objective? To lift up society’s oppressed without ruffling a single aristocratic feather. And as luck would have it, the duchess’s capable associates seem to be every bit as good at falling in love as they are at their jobs.

From page 69:

Of course she was dead.

It explained everything. Given everything that had transpired in the last twenty-four hours, he felt like a fool for not having figured it out sooner. A lady—and she was a lady, of that there was no doubt—did not learn how to do what she had done last night at a fashionable finishing school. She would have learned to do what she had done last night from experience.
Jamie moved past Gisele to the far side of the room, noticing the dust motes dancing in the bright ray of sunshine slanting through the window and across the floorboards. He took his time, trying to make sense of this peculiar conversation, a jumble of questions vying for his attention.

“What’s your name?” He decided to start with the easiest. “Your real one.”

Page 69 falls in the middle of one of the more emotionally charged scenes in the first half of the book between the hero and the heroine. Gisele has just confessed her darkest secret to Jamie and this marks the genuine honesty that begins to build between them. Both still have their own agendas at this point, but as the their bond of trust grows as the story unfolds, their motivations and their end game mesh into a singular goal. I think this passage perfectly represents both the story itself and the characters guiding it.

Visit Kelly Bowen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue