She thinks she can defy me with that sharp tongue, her eyes flashing like storm-lit steel in my candlelit drawing room.
The air hangs thick with beeswax and her unspoken desperation, the ruin of her family's estate pressing down on her like a shroud.
I've come to claim her as my mistress, offering salvation for her crumbling legacy.
She calls it chains. I call it mercy.

Her body betrays her every time we clash, inches apart in the flickering glow, tense muscles humming with the war she wages inside.
I bind her wrists in silken vows, not to break her, but to free the surrender she craves and denies with every ragged breath.
Pride makes her my enemy. Need makes her my obsession.
That defiant fire of hers? It calls to the scar hidden beneath my ruthless command, the vulnerability no one else has touched.

I growl my possession into the night, pulling her against me until resistance sparks into unbearable hunger.
She yields in feverish bursts, her nails raking my back as I take her over velvet settees and against polished walls, her moans a confession she can't unsay.
But every thrust, every whispered command, risks devouring us both - her fragile independence, my ironclad control, the honor we both pretend to cling to.
Her legacy hangs in the balance, one submission away from salvation or total ruin.

What if her resistance doesn't shatter under my mastery?
What if it unmakes me first?

A full-length Regency erotic romance featuring a commanding duke and his defiant reluctant mistress.