Sherry Thomas

“You are going to sit down to dinner with Lord Wrenworth. I can’t tell you how many mamas have tried to arrange the same for their daughters—to think this should just fall into your lap. You must be the luckiest lady in all of London.”

More unnerving words Louisa had seldom heard.

the blasted décolletage that made her chest look like the twin cheeks of a baby’s upturned bottom.

“You know very well, my lord, how difficult it is for a young woman of unexceptional birth, unexceptional looks, and no fortune at all to win the hand of a man in prosperous circumstances.”

“And?” he prompted.

“And nothing. I carried on. I was so accustomed to not having it that my life changed not at all. And so it will be with you. No matter how much I might want you, I will manage to endure it. And I will carry on as if nothing is the matter.”

He had thought often of what she’d said about the telescope she desperately wanted, about the simple fact of carrying on without it. There had been a dignity to her thwarted desire. There never had been any dignity to his once hopeless needs, but only wretchedness.

His eyes met hers again. “Let me give you everything you’ve ever dreamed of.”

But he couldn’t. Or at least, he wouldn’t.

For she could no longer be satisfied with an expensive telescope, an exemplary spinsterhood, or his sure-to-be-magnificent body—or even all three together.

She was a woman in love and she wanted nothing less than his unscrupulous and very possibly unprincipled heart, proffered to her in slavish devotion.

She grimaced at her dangerously self-indulgent thoughts. More evidence of her besottedness, that: The old her would never have woven an entire tapestry of starry-eyed amour out of spools of a man’s sexual curiosity.

But when she opened her mouth, out came, “I still want my house and my thousand pounds a year—for the duration of my natural life. And I want those conditions written into the marriage settlement.”

“Such a cynic.”

“Better be unromantic than thoroughly used and still poor.”

When they were married, she would not try to deny his dominance in the bridal bower—in that particular arena he would probably always render her breathless and helpless. But that was the only weakness she would ever admit, lust of the body. Her mind would remain her own. And her demented and slightly shameful love she would carry as a secret to her grave.