When it comes to diamondsâlike their menâsome women prefer them rough
Thanks to her grandfatherâs complicated will, Miss Adela Ruffington, along with her mother and sisters, is about to lose her home and income to a distant cousin, the closest male heir to the Millingford title. For Adela, nothing could be more insultingâbeing denied her rightful inheritance for a randy scoundrel like Wilson, the very man who broke her heart following a lusty youthful dalliance years ago.
Still smarting from the betrayal of his latest paramour, Wilson Ruffington never anticipates the intense desire Adela again stirs within him. Despite his wicked tongue and her haughty pride, their long-ago passion instantly reignites at a summer house party, the experience theyâve gained as adults only adding fuel to the flames.
Wilson and Adela are insatiable, but civility outside of the bedroom proves impossible. Determined to keep Adela in his bed, Wilson devises a ruseâa marriage of convenience that will provide her family with a generous settlement, as well as prevent scandalous whispers. Their plan works perfectly until family rivalries and intrigue threaten to destroy their arrangementâ¦and the unspoken love blooming beneath it.
Praise for
Portia Da Costa
A Sunday Times Bestselling Author
2012 RITA® Award Nominee for In the Flesh
âDa Costa pens a highly titillating, tantalizing tale.â¦
Not for the faint of heart, but Susan Johnson, Bertrice Small and Brenda Joyce fans will savor the delicious fantasies within.â âRT Book Reviews
âItâs been so brilliantly written that you forget that youâre [not in]
Victorian England.⦠Excellentâcanât wait to read the next installment.â âErotica For All (U.K.)
âPortia Da Costa has an incredible talent for writing erotic romance.
She is particularly adept at creating dominant heroes who push their loversâ limits hard, but fall in love so sweetly. She fills the pages with an unparalleled level of eroticism that singes.â âRomance Novel News
âForget about the rest and read the very best: Portia Da Costa.â
âSensual Reads
1
A Flash of Black
Rayworth Court,
Summer 1891
Wilson Ruffington was bored, bored, bored.
I shouldnât have come here. I knew it would be tedious. These affairs always are.
He looked this way and that, up and down the landing. Rayworth Court was an ugly rambling pile, badly designed in the first place and made worse by haphazard additions. Even he was having trouble finding his way around, when usually he could create a floor plan of any building in his mind, hypothesizing from only a limited amount of data.
Frowning at a particularly hideous ancestral portrait, Wilson sighed. Heâd come to this country house party for a change of scene, to shake off his ennui, but it wasnât working. Heâd never been a great one for the social scene at the best of times, but in the past two months or so, since the split from Coraline, heâd barely even left his house at all. With his mistress gone, what was the point? Work, study, writing, building things and tinkering with things, devising more things to build and tinker with, all this had occupied him. Technical commissions and consultations and his intense intellectual schedule had neatly allowed him to avoid the fact that the first woman in seven years that heâd actually considered proposing to had deserted him. Jiggered off with barely a âby your leaveâ in order to marry a seventy-five-year-old Italian duke.
âBitch!â
He spat out the word, but without any real fire. Did he even care anymore? It was only his trivial male ego that was affected by her departure. The greater part of him, the compartment of Wilson Ruffington that contained his intellect, simply trundled on as normal. His sexual appetite was a bit put out by her absence, and he certainly missed a regular diet of plentiful, vigorous and inventive fucking and other carnal activities. That lack, and his wounded pride, were the only things really getting his spirits down.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. To feel insulted and frustrated, and let it bother him.
Iâll go home, back to my workroom and my workshop. The people here donât interest me at all, and the women are ninnies.
Feeling more cheerful already, Wilson whipped his notebook out of the pocket of his dressing gown and scribbled down a quick list of readily available chemicals and other ingredients. During a brief foray into the kitchen gardens at the back of the house heâd noted an interesting form of blight on some of the vegetable varieties. If he gave this formulation to the earlâs head gardener, instructing the man to apply it as a soil dressing, it would at least go some way toward recompensing Lord Rayworth for his being such an abysmal guest.
Wilson closed his eyes and called up his imaginary floor plan, which worked this time. Left it was, then left again, and heâd find himself at the main staircase. Then up one floor and to his left again, and finally, the blessed sanctuary of his room. Perhaps heâd order up some tea, and some of that delicious plum cake heâd purloined from the kitchen when heâd passed through on his way in from the garden. He would instruct his man Teale to make arrangements for his departure, and while he waited, heâd lie in bed and think about a thorny problem with the submarine plans that was taxing him. The project was a government secret, so heâd brought no papers along, but he could do the calculations in his head. There had to be a way to make those damned flanges marry up correctly in such a confined space.