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She came to Italy to claim a duchy. Instead, she was told to marry the infuriating man determined to keep it.
Charlotte Ashford has spent her life mastering one rule: a woman of character remains herself under the influence of any emotion.Then she meets Lorenzo della Rocca.
Half-naked in a garden pool, outrageously charming, and entirely too pleased with himself, Lorenzo is also the rival claimant to the tiny Italian duchy Charlotte’s family has inherited. Her blood gives her the legal right to rule. His family has the loyalty of the people.
The Austrian council has a simple solution: Marriage. But Charlotte refuses.
Lorenzo considers that merely the opening move. Certain that his life has become an opera, he borrows a trick from L’Elisir d’Amore. Charlotte does not need persuasion. She needs an elixir—and Lorenzo intends to brew one from an Italian summer: vineyards, moonlit gardens, silk workshops, stolen rides, outrageous picnics, and a palace overlooking the lake.
His plan is simple. Make her fall in love with the land. Perhaps with him as well.
But the longer Charlotte stays, the more Lorenzo awakens everything she has spent a lifetime controlling—her laughter, her temper, her curiosity, her desire. And the more she wonders whether the man seducing her loves her… or only the duchy she can give him.
Lorenzo thinks he is the one administering the elixir. He never notices it has begun working on him. And the man who has spent his life fighting for a crown must decide what he wants more: the duchy he was born to reclaim—or the woman he has learned to love in every form.
Genre: Historical Romance
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