| | Sometimes it takes more than a kiss to change a toad into a handsome prince. When Captain Lucas Deverall returns from the Peninsular War to succeed to his deceased brother's title, he grudgingly decides to take back his wife. But even before he learns the circumstances of his inheritance, he encounters her at a New Year's gala. Shock sets in as he realizes the most beautiful woman in England is the same gangly, calf-eyed chit who tricked him into marriage six years before. That's not how Sophie remembers it. She wishes fervently she'd had the sense not to scream when the drunken scapegrace crawled into her bed at her Uncle Harry's house party. True, she'd had a secret tendre for the handsome wastrel, until his scathing denunciation of her after their forced wedding. Then he went off to war without even consummating their union, and for six years she heard nothing from him. Now the toad offers her forgiveness in exchange for his presence in her bed? Revenge comes more to mind. Sophie doesn't realize Lucas has matured. The war-weary veteran has long since given up the hellbent ways that brought him an unwanted marriage and estranged him from his half-brother, and he yearns for a stable family life instead of his chaotic childhood. But the title he thought would bring it to him is so riddled with debt that all the unentailed property is at risk. Worse, the wife he hardly knows has an enormous inheritance tied up in trusts he can't touch. The only solution, then, is to charm the deceiving chit into his bed and out of her money. He gives her a week before he will come for her and make her his wife in more than name. Then he launches a campaign to win her over. Sophie has other ideas, meaning to turn his own wiles against him, then reject him as cruelly as he did her. But when Lucas unleashes his charm, her old adolescent infatuation for him resurfaces. She wants him to believe in her, not just desire her, but nothing she says can convince him of her innocence. And she's not about to accept his forgiveness for something that was his fault in the first place. He may be able to force her into his bed, but he will never get her money, and she vows to outwit him somehow. And so the battle of wits begins. And the harder they fight it, the more they fall in love.
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