I rule this estate with a fist wrapped in silk.
But she slips through its candlelit chambers like a ghost of doubt, a bride-to-be whose every glance screams for the possession she swears to resist.
I've watched her too long, this woman haunted by a future she can't grasp, her defiance a thin veil over the vulnerability that calls to my blood.
One reckless night, I snap.
My hands pin her to the silk-draped wall, her struggles fueling the fury I unleash in bruising thrusts that mark her skin like dark roses unfurling.
She spits denial even as her body arches into mine, spent and sweaty in twisted sheets, our breaths clashing in the heavy silence after.

It's ravishment, pure and savage, born of impulse I can't leash.
Yet beneath the dominance, something cracks in me, a tenderness I never sought, pulling confessions from her lips she never meant to voice.
She fights the surrender, clawing at my control, but each yielding gasp exposes us both, raw and naked in ways decorum forbids.
Her prospects for security shatter under my touch; my isolation looms if she names me ruin.
This woman who defies me might be my salvation, or the blade that ends my guarded world.

Every shadowed hall echoes with our war, her obsession mirroring my hunger.
Furious rhythm against her resistance, bodies locked in battle that blurs hate and need.
What if her total yielding demands the trust I buried deep, redeeming our fractured fire, or dooming us to the antagonist's waiting jaws?

A full-length Regency ravishment erotic romance featuring a dominant duke and his defiant bride-to-be.