Sarnia de la Maré FRSA Author, Musician, Artist

#RomancePodcast #FictionPodcast #AudioRomance #NarratedFiction #ShortStoryPodcast #RomanticFiction #AudioDrama #LoveStories #PodcastRomance 💋 Mills & Swoon Daily #2 The Caged Bird and the Stable Boy Lady Isolde Ravenshaw entered the stables. She was a reluctant horsewoman but had made the effort because of him. Thomas the stable boy was not, strictly speaking, a boy.  At twenty-two he was marked with the attributes of maleness and beauty that were worthy of an Adonis. His muscular forearms and chiselled torso glowed in sun-browned competence.  Once she had seen him swimming on a hot summer afternoon having taken a wrong turn in the grounds of the estate. She had watched longingly, his naked body as it basked in sun and water in a simple celebration of movement, nakedness, and life itself. One did not normally encounter such thrilling attributes at London soirées. Isolde had had enough of pot-bellies and bad breath to last a life time. Thomas had flicked a switch and s...

  The French Riviera was unseasonably warm and offensively smug. Lady Honoria Bellweather had arrived with three trunks of silk, one cousin (mildly forgettable), and a vague desire not to get arrested....this time. She had not, at any point, intended to seduce a Hungarian count. That simply happened. Count Miklós Várady was, in her defence, tall, unreasonably bronzed, and cursed with the kind of accent that made even his hat sound suggestive. He was also in possession of a pastry yacht. “Do you mean a yacht for pastries or a pastry in the shape of a yacht?” she’d asked, suspicious. “Both,” he had replied, with a smirk that had probably unbuttoned dozens of corsets across Eastern Europe. The trouble began, naturally, with a tart. Not Honoria this time (though the local bishop would argue otherwise), but an actual lemon tart served during the Ambassadors’ Gala at Villa Les Oiseaux, a soirée so exclusive even the waiters required breeding. One minute, the tart sat proudly atop a silve...

                                         The Dilemma of the Disappearing Derrière  A Mills and Swoon short by Sarnia           It began, as these things so often did, with a bottom. Not Honoria’s, which was widely agreed to be both pert and philosophically unassailable, but the alabaster posterior of the Duke of Bellington, recently immortalised in marble by one Miss Lavinia Crimble—sculptress, troublemaker, and owner of the most expensive collection of scandal in Sussex. The statue, titled Man in Repose, had been commissioned for the gardens at Brimwell Abbey, and depicted His Grace reclining against an improbably convenient vine, entirely nude save for a suggestion of toga and an expression that suggested deep thought or mild constipation. Lady Honoria, attending the unveiling for the champagne and a chance to ogle the nobility in daylight, leane...