Sugar and Spice by Leda Swann **October 2006**

Even the primmest Victorian garb cannot mask Gwendolyn's delectable attributes—yet her handsome husband regards her with icy disdain. She has but one chance to save her marriage and avert a future of dashed hopes and despair . . . and it requires a visit to a house where sensuality reigns. Unable to satisfy the needs of the man she adores, Lillian is devastated when he seeks the amorous attentions of another. But there are passionate lessons to be learned if she joins the lovers in their erotic hideaway. . . To possess a bride as voluptuous and exciting as Cora would be any man's dream, yet Gareth cannot understand why the woman he wed despises him so. Still, he will not give her up without a fight, though it may take extraordinary imagination to make Cora's most wicked secret fantasies come true. So sweet. . . So hot! From "Obsessed" in SUGAR AND SPICE “Please.” To her horror, Gwendolyn Farrell felt the tears well up in her eyes. She blinked them back, not wanting him to see just how desperate she was. He could not refuse her. His refusal would toll the death knell of their marriage, a marriage that she was not willing to give up on. Not yet. Not until she had done everything humanly possible to win him back, to make him love her even just a tiny fraction as much as she loved him. She gazed at the man in front of her, at the hard planes of his face and the even harder look in his eyes. Being married to him was supposed to be her dream come true. Instead, it had turned into a waking nightmare. She swallowed convulsively. The very worst of it was that he was in no way to blame. Their estrangement, the utter desolation of their marriage, was all her fault. From "Enslaved" in SUGAR AND SPICE Lillian Rutherford stared into the mirror, her unblinking reflection staring straight back at her. Her fists were clenched out of sight in her lap, her knuckles white with tension. Her rapscallion husband would not make a fool of her. He absolutely would not. Felix, the rapscallion husband in question, lounged at his ease against the doorjamb, looking at her with a mocking grin. How she wanted to jump up from the seat at her dressing table and smash that grin right off his face with one angry blow of her fists. That would take him by surprise, wouldn’t it, if his placid, obedient, non-entity of a wife were to turn on him with murder in her heart. How she wanted to scream and yell at him, to rail and curse at him like a fishwife for breaking his vows to her. Again. And again. And again. But she was nothing if not a lady, and ladies did not scream or yell, curse or fight. Ladies always kept their voices low and their expressions calm. Ladies did not harbor anger so deep that it corroded their soul, or hurt so painful that it robbed them of breath.