When it comes to diamonds—like their men—some women prefer them rough
Thanks to her grandfather’s 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 insulting—being 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 they’ve 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 ruse—a 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 arrangement…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
“Da Costa pens a highly titillating, tantalizing tale.…
Not for the faint of heart, but Susan Johnson, Bertrice Small
and Brenda Joyce fans will savor the delicious fantasies within.”
—RT Book Reviews
“It’s been so brilliantly written that you forget that you’re [not in]
Victorian England.… Excellent—can’t wait to read the next installment.”
—Erotica For All (U.K.)
“Portia Da Costa has an incredible talent for writing erotic romance.
She is particularly adept at creating dominant heroes
who push their lovers’ limits hard, but fall in love so sweetly.
She fills the pages with an unparalleled level of eroticism that singes.”
—Romance Novel News
“Forget about the rest and read the very best: Portia Da Costa.”
—Sensual Reads
Diamonds in the Rough
Portia Da Costa
Dedicated to Alice, a dear little feline friend.
Contents
1
A Flash of Black
Rayworth Court,
Summer 1891
Wilson Ruffington was bored, bored, bored.
I shouldn’t 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. He’d come to this country house party for a change of scene, to shake off his ennui, but it wasn’t working. He’d 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, he’d 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 he’d actually considered proposing to had deserted him. Jiggered off with barely a “by your leave” in order to marry a seventy-five-year-old Italian duke.
“Bitch!”
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