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This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. M. C. Bunn will be awarding a $25 Amazon/BN GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.

One of this site’s earlier author blog posts by J. B. Glazer beautifully expresses the conflict many of us have felt while the pandemic rages: guilt for feeling happy while others suffer. Glazer emphasizes the need to resist that negativity and to share our joy and blessings if we’re lucky enough to have them. If we write books with happy endings—what I like to think of as visions of hope, we can spread our riches that way.

The year 2020 made me extremely thankful for what I do, which is write. It made me look with fresh eyes at friends and family, my dog, my home, the town where I live. “Look up!” as Court Furor would say. Past, simple pleasures, shared times, warm hugs, holiday meals and family gatherings; I sit at the kitchen table writing this and relive them all with a renewed sense of gratitude.

Where Your Treasure Is (Bellastoria Press) was born a decade ago during a difficult time for our family. I wrote it sitting on the couch with my dog and my mother by my side. I was teaching, so I rose early and stayed up late to work on the manuscript. At the time, the story was private, though Mama listened to me work out many of its thorniest passages. Publishing was not on my mind. The love story let me explore another time and create a new world. It took me back to London, to Norfolk, to Italy. My hours with Winifred de la Coeur and Court Furor, their families and friends were good ones.

The room where I work, the den and kitchen, is not large. Nor is it decorated, unless you like Weasley or Hobbit style. It’s stuffed with odd objects, antiques, and hand-me-downs. Furniture from my grandparents and in-laws, quilts and strings of colored lights, a broken-down recliner that belonged to the house’s prior owner, artwork by my musical partner’s girlfriend, a Tiffany lamp, and floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed full of books and knick-knacks, papers and photographs. The coffee press lives on the cast-iron frying pan, and the kitchen counter is somewhere under stacks of mail and baskets of vitamins and mason jars full of cutlery. A sliding glass door overlooks a shaggy back yard, a stream, and the woods. Tufts of my dog’s black hair roll under the couch and into every corner. Well, I’ll get to those eventually.

Is this the ideal work space? No. But it’s home, and I love it. It’s where I write in quiet to the sound of birds, my dog slung over my lap, or to the accompaniment of music while my husband plays the piano in the next room or sits nearby listening to a podcast or television program. This small space has been the scene of laughter and tears. It’s where I wondered what I was going to do with my life and found out when Winifred and Court appeared from nowhere and changed it with their love story, Where Your Treasure Is.

Feisty, independent heiress Winifred de la Coeur has never wanted to live according to someone else’s rules—but even she didn’t plan on falling in love with a bank robber.

Winifred is a wealthy, nontraditional beauty who bridles against the strict rules and conventions of Victorian London society. When she gets caught up in the chaos of a bungled bank robbery, she is thrust unwillingly into an encounter with Court Furor, a reluctant getaway driver and prizefighter. In the bitter cold of a bleak London winter, sparks fly.

Winifred and Court are two misfits in their own circumscribed worlds—the fashionable beau monde with its rigorously upheld rules, and the gritty demimonde, where survival often means life-or-death choices.

Despite their conflicting backgrounds, they fall desperately in love while acknowledging the impossibility of remaining together. Returning to their own worlds, they try to make peace with their lives until a moment of unrestrained honesty and defiance threatens to topple the deceptions they have carefully constructed to protect each other.

A story of the overlapping entanglements of Victorian London’s social classes, the strength of family bonds and true friendship, and the power of love to heal a broken spirit.

Enjoy an Excerpt

Winifred de la Coeur was not a traditional beauty, but she was one of a kind. Or so George had whispered while they played cards. He had won the hand and taken hers in his. After all these years, she ought to know better than to trust him.

********

On the day before she came up to London, she rode her horse Tulip across the fields to inspect the wood. Beyond it lay Hereford Hall’s brick towers, graceful lawns, and chestnut-lined drive. She had given Tulip a smart kick and galloped down the sandy lane that led to the sea. In spite of her elder cousins’ warnings, she and George had raced one another on it many times. She bent over her mare’s neck, urged her to go faster, and pretended to outdistance her neighbor. She was Queen Bess, who ruled a kingdom of her own. No need of any man!

Her pride could not bear that George, or even her family, might suspect that while she had won the battle against her suitors, she had lost the war. At summer’s end, once the field cleared and the dust settled, she discovered she was tired of holding up the increasingly heavy standard of her virginity. The other debutantes of her year had long retired from the lists on their fiancés’ arms or were preoccupied by their confinements. She had attended so many weddings she lost track of the sprays of orange blossom Bettina cleared from her dressing table or the number of silver rattles that she and Amelie had wrapped. Her freedom was not the triumph she had imagined it would be.

********

The hackney she’d seen earlier pulled alongside them at the curb. A bright spot of purple in the cabby’s hatband, the flower girl’s bunch of violets, caught her eye. Bunched beneath his dark chin was a plum-colored neckerchief, gaudily spotted. His profile was partly hidden under his hat’s brim, and his long, dark hair was pulled back in an old-fashioned queue…. His deep voice and Cockney accent were audible when he spoke to his horse. He was not the sort one would want to meet in a dark alley.

About the Author:M. C. Bunn is a writer of Victorian romance and historical romance novels, a singer (in the indie rock band Mister Felix), and a songwriter. She holds an English degree from UNC-Chapel Hill and a master’s in English from North Carolina State University.

“I’ve always loved writing. It’s a joy to do what makes me happy and to share it.

“My father was a great story-teller. He read to us at the dinner table and passed on his love of history. He’d haul me out of bed in the middle of the night if there was a great old movie on the late show, and family trips always included visits to historic sites. His father was born in 1888, and I have Granddaddy’s letters to his bride-to-be in my dresser. I’m working on the story of Daddy’s first ancestor in America. It’s set in Jamestown, 1690. My mother’s grandmother was placed in an orphanage after the Civil War because her father died on the way home, so I always felt that connection to and had a curiosity about the past. Both of my parents read to me before I could walk. Daddy gave me Dickens, Twain, and Stevenson. Mama put the dictionary in my hands and let me watch I, Claudius and Shoulder to Shoulder when they first aired on Masterpiece Theatre. She told me I’d be a writer one day.”

Acting was another girlhood passion. “I wanted to play all the characters in the books I’d read, or in the stories I made up, like Dickens and Louisa May Alcott did. I also wanted to be an archaeologist because we knew one who worked on digs in Israel. There was never a time when I wasn’t making up a story, and it was always set ‘a long time ago.’ What I really wished for was the car in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, so I could fly back in time and see what it was actually like for women in Victorian and Edwardian England.”

When she’s not writing, she loves reading long old books. “I love Anthony Trollope’s series, and Anna Karenina. Of more recent vintage, I really enjoyed The Forsyte Saga and The Raj Quartet.”

Her idea of a well-appointed room includes multiple bookshelves, a full pot of coffee, and a place to lie down and read. To feed her soul, she takes a walk or makes music with friends. “I try to remember to look up at the sky and take some time each day to be thankful.”

She lives in North Carolina with her husband and their dog. Where Your Treasure Is is her first published novel.

Buy the book at Barnes and Noble or Amazon.

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