The minute I finished Lady Windermere’s Lover I picked up The Duke of Dark Desires because, OMG, Julian. Sometimes you find a book that is all your catnip and you roll around in it and rub your face all over it, and this was that book for me. This is probably all you need to know: dissolute, rakish duke + dispossessed noblewoman disguised as governess + stolen art + The French Revolution = ALL THE THINGS.

The dissolute, roguish duke in question is Julian Fortescue, the hero of my heart in Lady Windermere’s Lover. He’s become a duke by series of misfortunes to his male relatives, and it wasn’t exactly on his to-do list. He’s all about collecting art and smexing the ladies.

The thing  I love, and the thing that is so hard to do with rake heroes, is that Julian isn’t a man-whore or alphahole. He doesn’t fall into the “I don’t know how to handle my feelings so I must put my penis in things” category. The problem with rake heroes is a lot of time they view the smexing as their right, as an entitlement by virtue of their superior lovemaking skills/ enormous weenis/ dukedom, whatever. Julian is more a hedonist: he enjoys pleasure for the sake of pleasure, whether it’s a painting or a lover. He’s approaching his lasciviousness on more honest footing, not as a misdirected emotional crutch.

And he’s fucking hot. And he’s got a wicked, droll sense of humor. And he has long black hair, and dresses only in black, and carries a cane because fuck you that’s why. I’m putting him in starter position on my romance novel Fantasy Hero team right next to Elizabeth Hoyt’s Lazarus Huntington and Eloisa James’ Duke of Villiers.

Ahem.

Anyway, so Julian is suddenly a duke. Then his newly-remarried mom shows up with his three step-sisters and is like “Well, I’m going to America now, so, surprise you’re raising your sisters.” Because apparently she’s a shitty person and once you get re-married you forget about your kids from your previous marriages.

This is also not on Julian’s agenda. Luckily for him a woman named Jane Grey applies for a position as a governess. He gives her the shittiest interview ever where he basically checks for a pulse because she’s super foxy, and then he hires her to be governess of his penis.

Even though Julian is quite fine, Jane is having none of his shit. She’s really Jeanne de Falleron, a French noblewoman who lost her entire family in the Terror. Jeanne’s father paid a Fortescue man with a collection of paintings to get her family smuggled out of France. That man betrayed them, and Jeanne is determined to find him and kill him.

We have a truly epic duke. We have a revenge-seeking noblewoman turned governess. We have intrigue. I’m loving this book so hard.

Jane spends her time tutoring Julian’s sisters and trying to discover which of his family members betrayed her. All the while there is this wonderful sexual tension between Julian and Jane. Because Julian is Jane’s employer, this tension could easily have turned exploitative and icky, but I thought that Neville did an excellent job of making Julian the pursuer without being an abuser. He views Jane’s rejections with more of a sense of humor than anything else, and at one point it felt like he may have perceived the flirtation between them as a game with no expectation of payoff. Plus Jane is clearly into what’s going on and she’s letting Julian know it. Unlike in Lady Windermere, Jane is more than Julian’s equal.

When Julian later finds out that one of Jane’s prior relationships was pretty awful(she was mistress at 15 to a solider, which ensured her safety at the time), he backs off even further. He still wants her, but he doesn’t want her to feel in any way coerced.

There was also a wonderful relationship that built up between Julian and his sisters. He’s not sure how navigate his new-found brotherhood, and he knows that his sisters are feeling understandably abandoned. He pretends to be unaffected and disinterested, while teasing them in a way that lets them trust that he cares about them.

In this scene he’s checking up on them during art lessons (and flirting with Jane):

“Julian? Brother?” It was Laura. “Will you look at my picture?”

“Are you any better than your sisters?”

Laura wafted him a sly grin that made him rethink his assessment  of Maria as the beauty of the family. The youngest had also inherited her mother’s looks, but she had a saucy charm that he hoped she wouldn’t lose as she grew up. Not with Jane Grey as example, possessor of her own saucy appeal. “I don’t know. I didn’t draw the same thing. I wanted to do something different.”

“I see.” Had this little black-haired cherub also depicted her brother as Mephistopheles? Probably not. After this morning he wouldn’t make the mistake of regarding his sisters as indistinguishable. They were still a confounded nuisance, but a slightly interesting one.

“I didn’t want to draw Miss Grey,” she said. “I drew a cat instead.”

He supposed it was a cat. It had whiskers. And a tail.  And those must be ears. “It’s terrible,” he said.

She giggled. “I know […]”

As you can tell from the above passage, the writing in this book is just excellent. It’s witty and taught and perfect. And the conflict is so good too. Jane’s quest for vengeance makes her falling in love with Julian inconvenient at best. And Julian isn’t an idiot. He’s aware that his governess is telling lies about her past, and that she’s not what she seems.

The entire time these two are navigating a sexual and romantic relationship, they are also dancing around their own private investigations into each other. They can never give freely because they’re both so consumed with suspicion, but God they want to.

That’s what really sold this for me. Julian and Jane don’t magically realize they’ve fallen in love at the very end; they’re both aware of it as it’s happening. They want it to happen. They’re both so tied up in lies, though, that it can’t.

Luckily the sex thing is working out great:

Her foolish tongue wouldn’t function so she dispensed with the formalities and hurled herself at him, clinging to him with all four limbs. He teetered a little but stayed upright, managing to lurch back the dozen yards to his bed where he fell backward, sinking into the mattress with her straddled over him.

“Good evening, Miss Grey,” he said. “I like the way you curtsey.”

The conflict isn’t just their respective suspicions though. As Jane whittles down the Fortescue men, she becomes more troubled by the idea that Julian himself might have betrayed her. When Julian brings a mysterious set of paintings back to England, everything boils over.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. As far as historical romances go, it’s got a lot of everything good. The hero and heroine break stereotypes and are fully fleshed characters. There’s intrigue and eroticism aplenty. Just make sure you pace yourself and savor this one.