The Rakess

By Scarlett Peckham

Named one of the Best Romance of 2020 by EW, Washington Post, NPR, and Bookpage!

Meet the SOCIETY OF SIRENS—three radical, libertine ladies determined to weaponize their scandalous reputations to fight for justice and the love they deserve…

She’s a Rakess on a quest for women’s rights…

Seraphina Arden’s passions include equality, amorous affairs, and wild, wine-soaked nights. To raise funds for her cause, she’s set to publish explosive memoirs exposing the powerful man who ruined her. Her ideals are her purpose, her friends are her family, and her paramours are forbidden to linger in the morning.

He’s not looking for a summer lover…

Adam Anderson is a wholesome, handsome, widowed Scottish architect, with two young children, a business to protect, and an aversion to scandal. He could never, ever afford to fall for Seraphina. But her indecent proposal—one month, no strings, no future—proves too tempting for a man who strains to keep his passions buried with the losses of his past.

But one night changes everything...

What began as a fling soon forces them to confront painful secrets—and yearnings they thought they’d never have again. But when Seraphina discovers Adam’s future depends on the man she’s about to destroy, she must decide what to protect… her desire for justice, or her heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9780062935625

Scarlett Peckham

Scarlett Peckham writes steamy historical romances celebrating alpha heroines. Her USA Today bestselling debut novel, The Duke I Tempted, was named a Best Romance Novel of 2018 by BookPage and the Washington Post. Scarlett lives in Los Angeles, where she enjoys trying to think of new ways to say “wicked,” collecting vintage romance clench covers, and dressing her cat up in bowties.

Book preview

Part One

From The Society of Sirens: A Memoir

By Seraphina Arden, 1827

Contrary to the legend, the night we formed the Society of Sirens did not begin as a revolt.

It began, ironically, with French champagne chilling in a silver bucket.

With me, wearing a new dress of scarlet silk and feeling my pulse beating in my throat as I applied the scent of bergamot to the hollows of my neck and thought, Tonight will mark the era of our vindication.

I remember swishing down the hall in that red gown, feeling like a dancer about to pirouette onstage after a lifetime of rigorous rehearsal. I stopped to pick up Jack Willow’s paper, so I could brandish it triumphantly as I greeted my three friends. I had rehearsed the words I would say to them in greeting, holding up our essay:

Relish it, my darlings. Look how far we’ve come.

So many years had passed since Lady Elinor Bell had first introduced us. Back then, we had been three lost, fallen girls, landing in Elinor’s parlor from disparate corners of society with only our low morals in common. I was the Cornish miner’s ruined daughter, correcting Jack Willow’s circular by day and bedding philosophers by night. Cornelia was Elinor’s niece, cast out by her aristocratic family when her relations with her painting tutor proved more than educational. And Thaïs was a lady of the night who had come to Elinor seeking donations to start a charity for girls forced into prostitution.

Elinor made daughters of us. She taught us that family could be hewn from love rather than blood. She showered us with guidance, introductions, and bequests, insisting that the misfortunes of our lives had been shaped not by any failing in our characters but by the concessions, injustices, and heartaches that made womanhood a kind of penalty.

She insisted on a principle that our biographies had theretofore contested: that we mattered. That girls—even so-called ruined ones—were not a thing that could be thrown away.

She’d saved us.

And now, with the publication of this essay, we were going to save others.

The article called for pledges to build a philanthropic institute that would work for the advancement and education of the female sex. We’d all had a hand in crafting the proposal, but only Elinor had signed it. We’d thought this was a clever act of subterfuge. The Crown increasingly saw the faintest whisper of equality as sedition—to stamp such a proposal with the names of disgraced women would certainly raise ire.

We reasoned that the faultless reputation of a proper matron like Lady Bell could disguise the radicalism of our ideas enough to demand a hearing.

We assumed that Elinor—a matriarch, a wife, a viscountess—was safe.

But we were wrong.

For when I answered the door that night, Elinor was not with Cornelia and Thaïs.

Instead, they clutched Jack Willow between them—hunched and bleeding, with two black eyes. Thaïs was breathing shallowly. Cornelia, who never cried, was weeping.

What’s happened? I asked, rushing them inside. Where’s Elinor?

He’s taken her, Thaïs whispered. Lord Bell. Says she’s gone radical and destroyed his good name.

Taken her? I sputtered, still not understanding. But where?

Jack leaned against the wall. He won’t say.

Cornelia gestured at Jack’s swollen face. He ransacked Jack’s shop. Said he’s going to the papers to expose Jack and Elinor as Jacobins and adulterers. Threatened to sue Jack for criminal conversation, shut down the whole press.

Elinor had always dismissed her husband’s jealousy over her friendship with Jack as amusing proof that Lord Bell, beneath his bluster, loved her.

But Bell’s possessive streak had been a symptom of ownership, not affection. And Elinor, despite her greater intellect, her larger fortune, and her kinder heart, was her husband’s minion under law.

And he wanted her to know it.

We realized, that night, that we’d miscalculated; Elinor had never been safe. And if she wasn’t, no woman was.

And if no woman was safe, what was the point of being cautious?

If the finest lady any of us knew could be abducted from her home by the man to whom she’d dutifully borne two children, then what did adherence to the codes of feminine respectability protect?

Perhaps there was more freedom in being the kind of woman who was not respectable. For such women have little left to take away.

As infamous, unmarried ladies branded harridans and whores in the endless gossip about us in the papers, did we not possess a kind of power? Bad women, after all, are the subject of endless fascination to the sex that wants to subjugate us. We were accustomed to our misdeeds being chronicled in headlines, discussed in village squares.

Why not attach our ideas to this notoriety? Why not raise money for our cause by waging a war of shock and scandal?

It was only then that we opened the champagne. We raised our glasses not in a toast but in a vow: to create a place that would make the world more safe for women like Lady Bell. For women like ourselves. For all womankind.

And to get Elinor her freedom from Lord Bell.

Which is all to clarify the rumor that the night we formed the Society of Sirens had been planned as a rebellion all along.

It wasn’t.

Sirens, you see, are not born thirsting for justice.

Sirens are made.

Chapter One

Thirty years earlier

Kestrel Bay, Cornwall

June 1797

At the ungodly hour of half past two on a sun-braced afternoon, Seraphina Arden stood before her looking glass in her flimsiest chemise, squinting against the glare coming off the ocean as she removed pins, one by one, from her coiffure.

She unspooled a long curl from above her temple and arranged it to trail over her left breast, drawing the eye to the hint of pink one could just barely make out through her thin lawn shift. She untucked another tendril from her nape, letting it unfurl down the middle of her back. The effect was louche, as though she had been grabbed in a passionate embrace.

Perfect.

She was the very image of an utterly ruined woman.

Henri enjoyed that kind of thing, if she recalled.

It had been years since their last encounter, but the memory of those nights in Paris still made her breath catch. Even mediocre painters had a facility with their hands that elevated the purely carnal to an art form—and Henri’s work was celebrated on three continents.

She draped a cloak around her shift and set off down the coastal path toward the abandoned belvedere at the border of her property and Jory Tregereth’s. As weather-wizened as a ruin, perched precariously among the cliffs, the old folly afforded a magnificent view of Kestrel Bay, if one didn’t mind steps overgrown with tufts of purple fumitory weeds and winds that nearly knocked you over as you climbed.

The air smelled like her childhood—like brine and sand and pollen. A heady, salty scent that made her ill at ease. She had come here to remember how that era of her life had ended, but now that she was here, every memory of it smarted.

Henri would be good for her. He would remind her who she had become, and distract from the relics of what she’d lost.

She ascended the steps carefully, wincing against the bright, flat glare off the Kestrel. At this time of day, the light hit the cliffs in such a blinding arc it was difficult to parse the sky from the sea.

But she only had eyes for Henri.

He’d come early. He was leaning against the balustrade with his back to her, absorbed in sketching cliffs. Oh, but he was picturesque. Like a chiaroscuro, with his dark clothes and hair cutting against the misty vista of the ocean. She’d forgotten precisely how well formed he was: long and lean with those broad shoulders and strong arms and clever artist’s hands. She couldn’t make out his face, but in silhouette his jaw was better made than she remembered. The two years since their last assignation had agreed with him.

Something inside her lit, in a way it hadn’t since that night six weeks ago, when Elinor had disappeared and all the pleasant parts of life had faded into numbness.

Henri, she said.

He didn’t turn, unable to hear her over the roar of the violent, salty air whipping off the ocean. Which gave her a delicious idea.

She draped her cloak over the rail of the belvedere, toed off her shoes, and crept forward, silent, silent, across the floor until she was just behind him. She placed a single finger at the bottom of his neck, below the knot of satin ribbon holding his raffish hair into a queue. That spot that lit up all the other spots that wanted touching.

No man could resist it.

She would know.

Henri, she whispered in his ear.

He leapt, arching his back toward a marble column behind him as though she was a cutpurse who’d assailed him rather than the woman whose bed he’d traveled hours to make use of. His sketchpad clattered to the floor. His face was obscured by the shadow of the column, but his hand caught her wrist and dragged her forward, toward the light.

She bit her lip at the pang of anticipation. He remembered how she liked it: rough.

What in Christ’s name? he growled in the low, clipped vowels of a Scot.

A Scot?

He stepped forward into the light, and his face was as harshly handsome as it was completely unfamiliar.

Who was he?

She wrenched her arm out of his grip and stepped back, clutching herself to block his view of her . . . her everything . . . through the filmy fabric of her shift.

She glanced up into his face, trying to place him, hating herself for worrying that he was someone from her past, someone who might say something cruel or reach out and—

Her bare foot landed on the page of his discarded sketchpad. She glanced down. It was not the cliffs he’d been drawing.

It was the jointed beams beneath the belvedere.

She glanced back up and caught him staring at her.

And there was such a terrible hunger in his eyes that they could have been her own.

Adam Anderson tore his gaze away from the woman who had nearly sent him toppling over the low stone balustrade and shrugged his coat from his shoulders, holding it out to her so that she might use it to cover herself.

I beg your pardon, madam. Here, take this.

She had been clutching her barely shrouded body protectively, as though he—not she—had been the one to pounce.

It was not an effective means of restoring her modesty. Standing as she was in that fierce shaft of light, her thin gown was transparent, swirling luminous around long, finely made legs that rose into lavishly flared hips and a dark thatch of—Christ.

She held his glance for a long moment. And then she dropped her self-protective posture, something like amusement blooming in her eyes, and padded calmly back across the stone floor in her bare feet, ignoring his attempt at chivalry.

Who are you? she asked idly.

Her gait was defiant, the shadow of her buttocks swishing from side to side beneath her gown in bored, unhurried time.

He felt a flash of irritation at himself for continuing to ogle her.

But that gown. The way it swirled around those legs beneath it.

Stop.

I’m Adam Anderson, he said to her back. Mr. Tregereth’s architect. Forgive me if I’ve disturbed you. He did not mention this building was in use.

The woman reached for a cloak she’d left tossed against the railing. She arranged it around her shoulders and glanced back at him, her expression wry. And I imagine he would not approve of it had he known.

Her face was arresting. Slanted black brows, an elegant slash of a nose, green eyes smudged with heavy lashes. It was a face he could have made a feast of drawing, in the days when he still drew women and not window fixtures.

Tregereth is not demolishing the belvedere? she asked. That would be a shame. It makes a pleasant little ruin and I enjoy looking at it from my window. She pointed up to the weathered but grand house that stood a half mile up the coastal path, at the promontory of the cliffs.

He’d been told the place was abandoned.

He gestured at a cracked piece of the stone floor that had begun to list, sloping down toward the cliff’s edge. This foundation needs rebuilding. It’s not steady. You should be careful, coming here alone.

Did you think, Mr. Anderson, she asked, widening her eyes, that I intended to be alone?

His sketchpad caught the wind and threatened to sail over the ledge. She stopped it with the toe of her bare foot, then bent down and handed it back to him.

For a brief moment, their fingers touched. The hairs on his forearms stood, as though she’d sent a current through him.

He wrenched his hand away, and she watched him do it, abrupt, a touch delayed.

Something knowing rippled through her eyes and the corners of her mouth turned up. If a gentleman should appear here in search of me, send him up to my house. And if you would be so kind, don’t mention this to Tregereth. He has never approved of my visits.

She winked, turned around, and strode up the steps in her bare feet, holding her slippers in her hand.

Forgive me, madam, I didn’t catch your name, he called after her.

She turned back. Seraphina Arden, she said with a low, theatrical bow and laughter in her eyes. Laughter that implied, Of course that’s who I am, you dullard.

Belatedly, he recognized her angular silhouette from the woodcuts sold in stalls along the Strand etched with the words The Rakess.

The woman climbing back up the cliff in a state of scandalous undress laughed at him because she should need no introduction; she was one of the most infamous women in all of England.

Chapter Two

When men indulge themselves in worldly pleasures outside the sanctity of marriage, they are called rake-hells and admired for their virility. They may marry, profit, and even rule this country with no spot upon their character. But if a genteel woman so much as walks out alone, it is whispered she is compromised. Why should a single rumor doom a woman for the same sin from which men are excused?

—An Essay in Defense of Ruined Women by Seraphina Arden, 1793

*  *  *

Seraphina awoke to the flotsam of the previous night’s revelry scattered around her bed and the body of a Frenchman wrapped around her person.

Henri stirred beside her. "Cherie," he murmured, half asleep, trying to rub her nose with his handsome, stubbled cheek.

She dodged and rose from bed.

Last night, Henri had tragically revealed himself to be that most unwelcome of creatures: a cuddler. One of many undesirable traits she had not recalled from their days in Paris.

He’d arrived with an alarming number of trunks, an avowed intention to spend the summer making love to her in the sunlight off the Kestrel, and most disturbing, the news that since their last parting he’d carried a lock of her hair in his coat.

She shuddered.

She had not yet had the heart to tell him that her idea of a blissful summer affaire de coeur was a rousing romp in bed followed by fond promises to repeat the adventure in another two years’ time when they parted in the morning.

Henri was sweet, but men were best left to administering boudoir pleasures and lifting things a woman oughtn’t. For finer intimacies, they only disappointed.

She’d invited Henri here to distract her from her memories of Kestrel Bay and the sickly feeling they lodged in her chest—not to enhance her unease with new anxieties.

She dreaded lovers who coupled bedsport with emotion. Nothing made her feel unsteady like a man who wasn’t leaving in the morning.

Besides, she’d spent most of her evening with Henri recalling the architect from the belvedere, and the way he’d sucked in his breath at her touch, like she’d stung him.

That’s what she needed—a stranger. The rush of pure seduction.

Which did not lessen the awkwardness of extricating herself from this misunderstanding with Henri, and his tender gaze, and his lock of stolen hair.

Darling? She poked his shoulder.

Mmmmm. He rolled over in her bed.

Oh, her pounding head. She had been far too liberal with the spirits last night, for wine was her most proven antidote to worry. She had hoped enough of it might rouse in her the courage to inform Henri he was a temporary guest. Or, failing that, at least alleviate the constant thrumming of her worries—Elinor, the book, the memories.

It hadn’t worked on any of them.

She bent down to gather the butt of a cheroot from a saucer on the floor and yelped as something sharp bit into her foot. Shards of last night’s wineglass twinkled from a puncture in her heel. She bent and plucked them out, wincing at the pain.

"Poupée," Henri murmured, rolling over at the sound of her distress. He winced at the sight of her blood. Mon dieu, ton pied!

Just a cut.

Come, let me kiss it better. He reached out and grabbed her shin. She backed away and jammed her smarting foot into her slipper, safe from the dubious healing powers of his lips.

Come back to bed, he pouted.

I’m afraid I have to write. Take your time. I’ll have Maria send up breakfast so that you are well fed for your journey.

There was a sudden heavy silence in the room.

My journey?

She grudgingly met his eye. My dear, you are so kind to offer to keep me company here. But you see, I’m woefully behind in my work, and with you here to tempt me, I’ll be too distracted to write. There’s a boardinghouse in Penzance if you wish to stay on. Excellent light.

Penzance, he repeated, as skeptically as if she’d said Hades.

It’s only an hour’s ride away—if I finish my book, I’ll come and see you at midsummer. Now be good and I’ll send your man up to make you handsome before luncheon.

She limped downstairs without waiting for a reply. Her secretary, Tompkins, was in the parlor, collecting more of the evidence of last night’s indiscretions.

What were her stockings doing discarded beside the sofa? Was that really another empty bottle of Château Margaux? Thank goodness Tompkins was constitutionally incapable of shock.

Oh, Tompkins. What a scene.

This precise scene—the empty bottles, the unwanted man, the aching temples—was becoming far too common. She was not known for temperance with spirits but lately she could be accused of being . . . injudicious. What had begun as a distraction from her concern for Elinor was in danger of settling into something more like a way of life. She kept meaning to retrench and be good. But the dread she felt every time she attempted to work on her memoirs made the desire to loosen the coil of her thoughts with a sturdy drink seem justified.

She’d be good later, when this was over.

Tompkins plucked a crystal decanter from inside the open belly of Seraphina’s late mother’s pianoforte and gave her the kind of smile that withheld judgment without exactly covering concern.

There’s coffee for you in the study.

Thank you. You are a saint. And I have the kind of headache due to the worst of sinners. I don’t suppose we have a headache powder?

Waiting with the coffee. And I left your correspondence. You’ve had a letter from Miss Ludgate.

At last. She itched for news from London. She had left it in a state of upheaval, all the papers whispering of Elinor’s sudden disappearance, and the announcement of Seraphina’s coming memoirs.

Bless you. And might I ask another favor? Please have Monsieur Lapierre’s servants see that his conveyance is ready to depart after luncheon. And give them the direction for the inn at Chapel Street.

Tompkins wrinkled her brow. Certainly. Though, it was my understanding he planned to stay through July.

Seraphina picked up the Frenchman’s discarded cravat with two fingers. Yes. That’s just the trouble, isn’t it?

Tompkins granted her a wry smile. I see. I’ll take care of it.

You always do. Thank you.

Seraphina walked into the small parlor she had adopted as her study. It held a view of the ocean, a table she’d repurposed as a desk, and little else. In her childhood, it had been the sewing room, where she had whiled away her days under her stepmother’s exacting observation, making useless embroidered handkerchiefs for a father too coarse to bother using them.

She had chosen this room to write her memoirs just to be perverse.

But perhaps the true victim of the irony was her. Her parents, after all, were dead. Whereas she was alive, and this room brought back her fury at them without precisely inspiring her to turn it into gripping prose.

She picked up the letter from Cornelia.

Sera darling,

I hope that the ocean is agreeing with you. Thaïs and I yearn for your return but we are contenting ourselves with rebellious plotting and fine wine in your absence. Write us and tell us how you are, for if you don’t, we will be forced to come after you to reassure ourselves you are rusticating in tranquility and not glowering into the cliffs and beating your breast thinking of Him. If you are tempted to do the latter, even briefly, please let this note be your reminder He is not worth it.

JW is avoiding letters as Bell’s solicitors are following him and he suspects they read his post, but he visited me yesterday with news from his investigator. Prepare yourself for this next sentence, love, for it’s not a happy one: we think that bastard Bell has E locked in an asylum. JW’s man believes the place is somewhere near Bell’s holdings in the South, but has not yet been able to confirm the whereabouts. I’ll write as soon as I know more.

Don’t despair, dear. We’ll find her, and we’ll bloody free her if we have to storm the castle keep ourselves.

Thaïs has just arrived and she sends her love as well and says WRITE US, WENCH.

With love,

Cornelia (and Thaïs)

Lady Elinor Bell in an asylum.

They had assumed Bell was holding Elinor in one of his Northern properties—perhaps his shooting estate in Scotland. This was so much worse.

What corrupt institution would accept an able-bodied, perfectly sane woman as a lunatic, regardless of what lies her husband claimed about her fidelity? Was the suggestion that women would benefit from education, apprenticeships, and independence so incredible that a physician would believe it was symptomatic of insanity?

She felt the anger she had come here to remember, yes.

But she also felt the vulnerability that came with bold transgression. It was one thing to be defiant in the company of people who agreed with you. It was quite another to do so in the world of men who saw your actions as the early symptoms of a coming plague.

They must be careful.

She must be careful.

Nonsense. Don’t let them make you timid. That’s exactly what they want.

She needed something to calm her nerves.

Out the window, she noticed the architect in the distance, walking from Tregereth’s toward the empty drover’s cottage up the downs. He must be staying at the cottage while he did the renovation.

He really was a striking man, with that sun-tanned skin and lustrous hair and excellent, broad shoulders. The memory of his fingers biting into her wrist had been the most exciting part of her entire evening with Henri.

She wondered if Mr. Anderson was as skilled at his trade as he was at staring soulfully out to sea. If so, he would have to be a genius, for she had not seen a man look quite so appealing in an age—and she was not in the habit of leaving appealing men unnoticed.

She could find uses for such a person.

She, Thaïs, and Cornelia had made a pact to build a handsome, dignified building in the middle of London for their institute. The kind of building that would assert by its sheer heft the worth of women like themselves, and rebuke by its elegance the notion that a certain kind of lady had no claim on decency, let alone the rights of men.

They had come up with a goal of raising fifty thousand pounds, on the basis of that number sounding large and impressive. But it would help to have a sense of how much the building they imagined might actually cost.

Perhaps she could ask Mr. Anderson’s advice, as a favor.

It would be a serviceable prelude to gleaning his enthusiasm for providing other sorts of favors.

She dashed off a note.

Tompkins, she called. Would you mind another errand?

Adam lifted his face to the humid wind blowing off the cliffs as he made his way back up the path toward the cottage he’d let for the summer. Cornwall in June was a sultry, sticky business, and he paused to remove his waistcoat and unknot his cravat, letting the breeze filter through his linen shirt.

He heard a clacking in the distance and looked up to see he was passing by Miss Arden’s house. A shutter on her terrace window was loose, blowing in the wind. He had the strangest urge to walk up the steps to her property and offer to fix it.

But that would be perverse, as he’d spent most of the previous evening fighting off distracting thoughts of her knowing smile when she’d caught him looking at her. Had there been an invitation in it?

It didn’t matter. He was not here to think of women.

He averted his eyes from her house and walked more quickly.

The glare of Cornish summer was a welcome respite from the gray light of Cheapside, even if the work he’d taken on for Tregereth was the kind that left him irritated at the necessary frivolity of renovating yet another country pile when he itched for work of real distinction.

But distinction was a privilege for the rich. He needed to do well by this commission, for in a stroke of luck, Tregereth’s house happened to be directly down the coach road from Alsonair, the principal holding of the Marquess of Pendrake, who helmed the Board of Works. Pendrake was said to be on the cusp of commissioning a new naval armory, the Crown’s largest public building in decades. It was Adam’s fondest hope that Pendrake might be moved by the graceful signature of Anderson Mayhew, Architects, as he passed by Tregereth’s.

Perhaps Adam could even secure an introduction.

He’d been waiting for such an opportunity for half his life. The firm he had founded with his brother-in-law’s backing was moderately successful, but the patronage of baronets requiring additions to their modest manors was not going to lead him to the kind of commissions that would fulfill the promise he’d made to his wife’s family when they’d allowed their daughter to marry so far beneath her station.

Mayhew had invested in Adam’s firm believing him capable of great works, with great return on capital. Bridges. Aqueducts. Public institutions. He owed the Mayhews far too much to continue building fripperies for country squires year after year.

Particularly given what he’d already cost them: their daughter.

He could not make up for the loss of Catriona. But he would feel better if he could at least repay his share of the six thousand pounds in capital Mayhew had invested when they’d moved the business to London.

Papa, a small voice cried from the distance.

He looked up to see his children gamboling down the hill. He was shocked by how transformed they looked after a fortnight here, as though they’d breathed in happiness with the seaside air. Perhaps they’d inhaled too much of his own melancholy with the dreary London fog these last three years. Here, they seemed lighter.

Adeline rushed toward him as he rounded up the path. He grinned at his grass-stained, spritely daughter even as his heart lurched to see her smile like that—at only four, she was already the very image of her mother.

Papa! We saw a lamb. He came right up to me, Addie told him, breathless.

Adam scooped her up into his arms, enjoying the peal of laughter this provoked. What lamb could resist the lovely Adeline? he asked her.

It was a sheep, Jasper corrected, intent that his sister should know the difference. Three white sheep and one black one.

Adam reached down and ruffled his boy’s hair, wondering if there had ever been such a solemn seven-year-old. Then I hope you apologized to the lot of them on behalf of your sister. Grown sheep detest being called lambs.

Adam’s own sister chuckled from the blanket where she was tucked under an enormous straw bonnet against the sun, reading a book. We took a walk up the downs this morning. Jasper made the acquaintance of the shepherd and Adeline engaged in a barking competition with his dog.

Adeline gave a sharp bark into his ear to demonstrate. Arrruff! Arrrrrrruff!

Adam lowered her to the grass. Run and play, he said, scooting her off to join her brother, who had already lost interest in the adults and was constructing a fortress out of the shards of Cornish shale that pebbled the grasses and tufts of gorse along the cliff tops.

He glanced down at the cover of his sister’s book. An Essay in Defense of Ruined Women. Seraphina Arden’s signature work.

He stiffened.

He had not mentioned his encounter with its author

Reviews for The Rakess

[jorgeousjotts · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is my first book from this author, I liked the idea of reading about a Rakess for a change, but otherwise I didn't know what to expect. It ended up being quite interesting and engaging. The heroine was much more than *just* a rake, and it gave the hero the opportunity to stand out from the crowd as well. Their relationship was steamy and complicated and sweet, and I really enjoyed it. I loved her friendship with the other rogue ladies as well, (strong female relationships are underrepresented in every genre), and I'm looking forward to reading their stories.

[spinsterrevival · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Absolutely loved this romance. The heroine and hero both had wonderful depth, and I enjoyed how the typical “rake” trope was flipped. I especially love late-18th-century feminists and look forward to continuing the series as it comes out.

[nelispelusa · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

ok I read the blurb and said yup I like this, however I started reading and did not agree with that. why well it bored me, and it is supposed to be a romance book and I didn't feel we got that til way later, more than half a book later. Seraphina, I was wishing she was the type of heroine I liked, but she wasn't she was drunk and it seemed that is what she was always gonna do, I tried to remember that the tables were turned which it would be something that a Rake would do but I dont know it didn't sell it well to me. She meets Adam who is actually a really nice guy and has 2 kids, but would he really want Seraphina around..rcvd an ARC at no cost to author..(netgalley) voluntarily reviewed with my own thoughts and opinions