Speechless Blog Tour! ~ Excerpt & Giveaway!

Hello, my friends! I'm very excited to have Jessie Lewis on the blog today! I have read and LOVED her new book, Speechless. From the first page, I was hooked! It's one of my favorite scenarios in a P&P variation! 5 stars!

I hope you enjoy the excerpt below and be sure to enter to win an e-copy of Speechless! Details for the giveaway are at the bottom of the page. 

Hello, Candy, and thank you for inviting me to stop here at So Little Time... on my blog tour for Speechless. It’s a story that I hope will please fans of Darcy and Elizabeth because it’s almost exclusively them throughout. That fact is precisely what horrifies them the most at first, which makes for some interesting exchanges! In this excerpt, Darcy is only just coming around after having sustained an injury and is trying in vain to make sense of what’s happened to him.

***

     “Come, Darcy. I must have you breathe. I hate to see you thrashing about in this stupid manner.”

     Darcy opened his eyes. “Bingley?” The man standing over him in full evening dress did not look like his friend, but he sounded like him, and his cocked hat was placed the wrong way on his head, which seemed apropos. “What has happened to me?” 

     “Strangled, old fruit.”

     “Strangled? By whom?”

     “A bear.”

     “What?” 

     Bingley was gone, however, and all was dark again. 
Darcy sipped, for there was water upon his lips. “Who did this?” he begged, though this time, he had no voice, and the question hurt to ask. He found he no longer cared. The means mattered little; that he was injured remained true whatever the cause. He sipped more water and prayed for everything to cease hurting. Never had he known pain that permeated even the deepest sleep. It did not relent even for a moment.

     “Physician?” he begged—or attempted to. His numb lips misshaped the word, and the obstruction in his throat stole what was left of the plea. “Poppy?” he mouthed. “Milk of the pop—” He gave up, exhausted.

     “I am sorry,” a voice too feminine to be Bingley’s said, “I have nothing to give you for the pain. Though—” A loud scrape muffled whatever words were spoken next, and the voice faded away. Time pulsed in Darcy’s ears awhile. Pain throbbed in his neck, and he drifted helplessly in obscurity. 

     An icy touch at his throat awoke him. He flinched away from it, and then grimaced at the agony of so sudden a movement. He lifted a hand to identify the coldness that stung his skin but was pushed gently away.

     “Pray, leave it a moment, Mr Darcy. ’Tis only snow.”

     He frowned, baffled, yet snow was a less threatening delusion than a murderous bear, and he had not the wits about him to query it. In any case, its icy burn had begun to affect a small but sublime reprieve from his torturous breathing—and he felt certain he knew that voice intimately enough to trust it.

     “What has happened to me?”

      He received no response. Somebody dabbed at the rivulets of melted snow that ran behind his ears and into his hair, but whomever did so gave him no answer. Perhaps it was another hallucination. He asked again. The fussing ceased.

     “Forgive me, I cannot understand you. Could you move your lips more slowly?”

     He thought he had spoken aloud. Though, he also imagined he had been talking to his sister and, it would now seem, this was not she. Was he losing his mind?

     “What happened?” he mouthed slowly and pointed at his throat. 

     “You were kicked by a horse.”

     It was more probable that he had been strangled by a bear. A man kicked in the neck by a horse would like as not be too dead to enquire about it, mutely or otherwise. Perhaps he was dead. He asked if it were so.

     “I am sorry,” came the answer after a pause. “I simply cannot understand what you are trying to say. Pray, rest for now. I can answer your questions when you are better recovered.”

     Dead people did not recover. With the snow at his neck now merely warm dampness and the constant scraping sound of his breathing showing no sign of abating, that seemed as much comfort as he was likely to find at the present moment. He released the last of the air in his chest and surrendered once again to darkness.

Speechless
by Jessie Lewis

Could anything be worse than to be trapped in a confined space with the woman you love?

Fitzwilliam Darcy knows his duty, and it does not involve succumbing to his fascination for a dark-eyed beauty from an unheard of family in Hertfordshire. He has run away from her once already. Yet fate has a wicked sense of humour and deals him a blow that not only throws him back into her path but quite literally puts him at Elizabeth Bennet’s mercy. Stranded with her at a remote inn and seriously hampered by injury, Darcy very quickly loses the battle to conquer his feelings, but can he win the war to make himself better understood without the ability to speak? 

Thus begins an intense journey to love and understanding that is at times harrowing, sometimes hilarious and at all times heartwarming.

Buy: Amazon US (paid link) • Amazon UK • Amazon CA
Add to Goodreads.

FTC Disclaimer: Link to Amazon US. I am an Amazon Associate. Should you purchase a copy of the book through the link provided, I will receive a small commission. Thanks! 

About the Author

Jessie Lewis, author of Mistaken and The Edification of Lady Susan, enjoys words far too much for her own good and was forced to take up writing them down in order to save her family and friends from having to listen to her saying so many of them. She dabbled in poetry during her teenage years, though it was her studies in Literature and Philosophy at university that firmly established her admiration for the potency of the English language. She has always been particularly in awe of Jane Austen’s literary cunning and has delighted in exploring Austen’s regency world in her own historical fiction writing. It is of no relevance whatsoever to her ability to string words together coherently that she lives in Hertfordshire with two tame cats, two feral children and a pet husband. She is also quite tall, in case you were wondering.

You can check out her musings on the absurdities of language and life on her blog, LifeinWords.blog, or see what she’s reading over at Goodreads. Or you can drop her a line on Twitter, @JessieWriter or on her Facebook page, JessieLewisAuthor.

Blog Tour Schedule

Dec 2 - Austenesque Reviews
Dec 3 - Savvy Verse & Wit
Dec 4 - Diary of an Eccentric
Dec 5 - So Little Time...
Dec 9 - From Pemberley to Milton
Dec 10 - My Jane Austen Book Club
Dec 11 - Babblings of a Bookworm
Dec 12 - Facebook Live Quills & Quartos: A Reading with Jessie Lewis

* * * GIVEAWAY * * *

It's giveaway time! Quills & Quartos Publishing is giving away one ebook of Speechless per blog tour stop. All you need to do to enter the giveaway is, comment on this blog post, and Quills & Quartos will randomly choose winners for the entire blog tour on December 19. So, make sure you join in the conversation!

So, friends, what do you think? Did that excerpt grab you? Poor Mr. Darcy! Don't you just love it when Darcy and Elizabeth are forced to be together in some way?