Cerise DeLand joins us this week to tell us about Napoleon’s very real threat to invade England and how she wound it into her fiction.
The D-Day invasion of Normandy was a valiant endeavor by a combined force of allies to defeat an enemy. But that event—made up of convoys of ships, submarines, air defense and
airmen, soldiers and marines—was not the first such invasion conceived by one country.
Napoleon ordered an invasion of England’s southern coast in the summer of 1805. Preparing for air, land and sea assault, he had all kinds of weaponry made. Hot air balloons, tunnel digging machinery and a flotilla of amphibious landing gear similar to what you see in film of D-Day soldiers on flat-bottom boats evacuating into the open waves. The French emperor had wanted such an invasion for many years. He encouraged his admirals to strike British shipping, naval and commercial.
But he was met with defeat many times.
Bemoaning his admirals’ “whining and delays”, he pushed them into conflicts they could not win. For a show of strength, he assembled 200,000 soldiers of his Grand Army in Boulogne along the Normandy coast and held maneuvers with soldiers shouting and chanting, taunting their enemy across the waves. The noise carried across the Channel and sent thousands of English
residents fleeing with their possessions.
Against this reality, my next release (coming in September), LORD CARLISLE’S ENTICING LURE in my SCARLETT AFFAIRS series highlights this threatened invasion—amidst a romance that will thrill you with its charm and torment.
About the Book
Widow Madame Giselle Laurant has fled France and the police who would throw her in La Force for her arrogance. She has a talent, a rare one. She draws landscapes to scale—and she draws them in such a way that a trained naval expert can make calculations from them. Giselle is about to finish her set of drawings of English coastal seascapes
when she meets a man she cannot resist. Clive Davenport, Marquess of Carlisle, is an advisor to the Foreign Office for naval affairs—and his desire for the lady who draws so inflames him with a need to make her his. When he discovers that her drawings bear a certain odd characteristic, he questions if Giselle is friend or foe.
Her drawings tell him she lies. Her kisses declare she truly loves him. Can he find proof she is a French agent? If he has Giselle arrested, can he live with himself? Worse, can he live without her?
I hope you are reading my series, all of which feature hot-to the-touch romantic suspense action-adventure love stories with guaranteed happily-ever-afters.
FIND THEM HERE: https://amzn.to/4clTGvi
About the Author
Cerise DeLand is the USA Today Bestselling Author who believes love brings rich rewards from a life lived with honesty, valor—and a functioning funnybone. Known for her poetic elegance and accuracy of detail, she’s won awards for many of the more than 70 novels she’s written.
Her work has been nearly life-long! First published in 1991 by Kensington, then Pocket Books, St. Martin’s Press and independent presses, she is now published by Dragonblade Publishing. Plus her books have been monthly selections of the Doubleday Book Club and the Mystery Guild.
To research, she’s dived into the oldest texts and dustiest library shelves. She travels abroad taking good walking shoes, big notebooks, trusty pens and a camera! She visits chateaux and country homes she loves to people with her own imaginary characters.
And at home every day? She cooks. (Every night.) Never dusts. (That can be a problem.) She goes swimming or pumps iron once a week and tries (desperately) to grow vegetables in her arid backyard in south Texas!
The Book Trailer