This is a delicate tea with an intensely floral aroma and a honey-colored soup. I am having it probably about thirty minutes before this newsletter gets sent, after a morning of panic, fear, and bureaucracy.

 

Specifically, I spent the morning putting a book up for preorder, which is a thing that is part excitement and part horrific terror, because having a book available means people will read it and (hides) that's scary for me. I realize it is also the whole point, but it's still scary.

 

In any event, I needed something soft and calming, and so I reached for an oolong. It won't have so much caffeine that it will get me wired, but it has depth and complexity. Most of all, it contains magic tea chemicals, which I could name if I wanted to google them. I don't.

 

Very few of my irrational panics seem to survive magic tea chemicals, and having plied myself with tea, I can now tell you about the book.

I both want to babble about everything related to this book and also tell you everything and also to go and hide and not say anything at all.

 

This book took a long time to write because I (temporarily) had interest in film rights for the first book in this series and it put me so deeply in my head, thinking about too many people being aware of my work, that I couldn't write at all. 

 

I did not know that this was a thing that could happen. I wrote a large number of very bad starts on books that are not this one. When the time on that interest expired, I very quietly said “please let me finish the series before I try anything else” to my film agent. And as soon as I was free and unencumbered by the threat of good things, I could finally see what the book needed to be.

 

Now that it is close to its final form, I am incredibly proud of it.

 

This is my pottery fraud book, my fake (fake) engagement book, my book where the hero is a rigid follower of rules except the rules he learned came from his father, who was a charlatan from a long line of charlatans.

 

This is also a book about learning who your mother really is. And now I'm going to shut up before I tell you about the whole entire book out of order, and just give you the description.

 

This is also, first and foremost, a book about tea cups.

 

 

Miss Naomi Kwan has spent years wanting to take an ambulance classes so that she can save lives. But when she tries to register, she’s told she needs permission from the man in charge of her. It would be incredibly wrong to claim that the tall, taciturn Chinese nobleman she just met is her fiancé, but Naomi is desperate, and desperate times call for fake engagements. To her unending surprise, Liu Ji Kai goes along with her ruse.

 

It’s not that Kai is nice. He’s in Wedgeford to practice his family business, and there’s no room for “nice” when you’re out to steal a fortune. It’s not that the engagement is convenient; a fake fiancée winding herself into his life and his heart is suboptimal when he plans to commit fraud and flee the country.

 

His reason is simple: Kai and Naomi were betrothed as children. He may have disappeared for seventeen years, but their engagement isn’t actually fake. It’s the only truth he’s telling.

Preorder The Marquis who Mustn't on:

Note: if there's something you want to know about this book, reply! 

I'll answer questions next week. Serious questions are good, but silly questions are extremely encouraged. I will try to get to everything if I can.

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