Under the Mistletoe features two passionate romances by Bronwyn Scott and Marguerite Kaye. We recommend curling up with a hot drink and mince pie while escaping with these wonderful, uplifting stories.

Hear more about them from Bronwyn and Marguerite themselves…

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Dr Peverett’s Christmas Miracle by Bronwyn Scott

Under the Mistletoe is our third collaboration together and our second Christmas collab. Usually, our collaborations have involved characters that exist in the same setting, like a house party, and their stories overlap. This time, we opted to connect our two stories through the use of common themes. Our heroes and heroines are all returned from the Crimean War, they all have a strong sense of social justice and they have had similar experiences in their background, and all four of them are facing changed circumstances, since coming home. While the stories are separate from each other both stories address similar holiday themes of giving, charity, family and home.

Dr. Peverett’s Christmas Miracle is the final installment in my Peveretts of Haberstock Hall series which focuses on the family of a country doctor in Hertfordshire. William, the oldest, is returning from the Crimea where he’s spent three years as a doctor treating soldiers. This has been life changing for him and has redirected his medical calling. He no longer wants to take over his father’s country practice, so for him, it’s very much a case of how can he go back to what he was now that he’s seen the world? Yet, how can he disappoint his father, whom he greatly admires?  The heroine, Honoria McGrath, is also looking to find her way now that she’s been abroad and has found her calling in nursing. But no one in London wants to hire her.  When William invites her home to Haberstock  for the holidays, she’s thrilled at the chance to escape her problems for a while.  This is a story about three things 1) homecomings, and the idea of ‘never being able to go home again,’ how do we reconcile those two opposites especially at the holidays and when we want to please others? 2) It’s about having a purpose driven life that involves finding one’s path in life and how standing up for others often starts with standing up for yourself. 3) Finally, it’s about family. The people who love you, always love you wherever you go, whoever you become, they still love you, it’s just us sometimes who doubt it.

Bronwyn

The Lady’s Yuletide Wish by Marguerite Kaye

One of the reasons I love to write with Bronwyn is that we ‘get’ each other, which is vital when you’re collaborating remotely via email. We both write very independent heroines and we both champion the underdog, so when she suggested we write a duet with shared themes rather than a shared world, which is what we’ve done in previous duets, I knew it would work. And more importantly, I was confident that we were both already thinking along the same lines.

Unlike me, Bronwyn had a strong idea for her story, but coincidentally the setting in the aftermath of the Crimean and her heroine’s occupation were perfect for a character of mine whose fate I had long wanted to write. Isabella, my heroine, is another daughter in my Armstrong Sisters series. I’d introduced her as a child in the last book, Unwed and Unrepentant, at the same time, questioning her heritage. What sort of woman would the child become? This is what I set out to explore in my story.

Like Honoria in Bronwyn’s romance, Isabella has volunteered as a nurse, and like Honoria when she returns to England after the war, she finds that her lack of qualifications and her determination to go her own way make her un-employable, as far as the profession is concerned. (This is another theme I’ve touched upon in Never Forget Me, which is set in the aftermath of World War One.) Again like Honoria, Isabella cannot forget the injustices she’s seen in the Crimea, the different ways that the officers and men are treated, so she sets out to help them and their families, establishing a soup kitchen in the East End of London.

My hero is Eugene, an investigative journalist who has made his career exposing poverty and exploitation and who has, to his horror, inherited his much-loved brother’s title and dark secret. It is this secret that brings him to the East End, and an encounter with Isabella – the nurse he has had a memorable one-night stand with at the tail end of the Crimean war. The attraction between the two of them is still dynamite, but it is Eugene’s quest which brings them together.

Christmas can be a wonderful time of the year, but for those who don’t have someone to share it with, or who simply can’t afford to celebrate, it can be depressing and traumatic. In different ways, both Eugene and Isabella are social outcasts in a world that has changed fundamentally for them. A ‘traditional’ family Christmas is out of the question, but what I wanted to write (again, in tune with Bronwyn) was a Christmas that allowed them to embrace their own kind of family, on their own terms. Have I achieved what I set out to do? Over to you, Dear Reader.

Marguerite

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Under the Mistletoe by Bronwyn Scott and Marguerite Kaye

By Lauren Gardiner