Tasha Alexander - Tears of Pearl

“Maybe I’m greedy.” My voice was raw.

“Forgive yourself for that,” he said. “When you’re well enough to travel, I’m going to take you away to somewhere safe and prove to you beyond doubt that you, my dear girl, are everything to me. But in the meantime...” His voice trailed off and he kissed me, his tongue coaxing my lips apart.

“Yes?” I asked when he pulled back.

He stood and picked me up, cradling me in his arms, and stepped to the balcony, where he gently set me in a chair. Ducking back into the bedroom, he grabbed a blanket and tucked it around my shoulder, then my knees, then under my feet.

“There is a boat downstairs waiting to take me to the European shore. It’s been there from the moment I knew I’d lost our bet. Prepare yourself, darling wife. I am about to swim the Bosphorus for you.”

While I’ve tried to stay true to the history of the twilight days of the Ottoman Empire, I have chosen to take a few liberties. My character Bezime is based on an actual person, the valide sultan who eventually came to be called Pertevniyal. Deciding it might be confusing to have two valides whose names started with “P,” I kept her as Bezime. I have further played with history by letting her stay alive some years longer than she actually did. How could I resist having such an extraordinary character avoid death long enough that Emily might meet her? The real Bezime slapped the empress Eugénie, was extremely interested in astrology, smoked a pipe, and attacked the minister of war when he came for her son, the sultan. She was not, however, unceremoniously murdered by an unruly Englishman.

Tasha Alexanderis a graduate of Notre Dame, where she signed on as an English major in order to have a legitimate excuse for spending all of her time reading. Following graduation, she played nomad for several years, eventually settling with her family in Tennessee. When not reading, she can be found hard at work on her next book featuring Emily Ashton.