Wicked Intentions (Maiden Lane) [Mass Market Paperback]

Elizabeth Hoyt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2010 | Series: Maiden Lane (Book 1)

From the New York Times bestselling author of To Desire a Devil comes this thrilling tale of danger, desire, and dark passions.

A MAN CONTROLLED BY HIS DESIRES . . .

Infamous for his wild, sensual needs, Lazarus Huntington, Lord Caire, is searching for a savage killer in St. Giles, London's most notorious slum. Widowed Temperance Dews knows St. Giles like the back of her hand-she's spent a lifetime caring for its inhabitants at the foundling home her family established. Now that home is at risk . . .

A WOMAN HAUNTED BY HER PAST . . .

Caire makes a simple offer-in return for Temperance's help navigating the perilous alleys of St. Giles, he will introduce her to London's high society so that she can find a benefactor for the home. But Temperance may not be the innocent she seems, and what begins as cold calculation soon falls prey to a passion that neither can control-one that may well destroy them both.

A BARGAIN NEITHER COULD REFUSE

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Bestseller Hoyt (To Desire a Devil) brings steamy sensuality to the slums of early 18th-century London in this engaging series launch. Demure widow Temperance Dews desperately needs funding for her orphanage. Lazarus Huntington, the famously debauched Lord Caire, needs to find out who murdered one of his mistresses. Lazarus offers Temperance an interesting bargain: if she will be his guide in the grimy neighborhood of St. Giles, he will pay the rent she owes and introduce her to more respectable nobility who might serve as patrons. Dire circumstances force the pair into intimate situations as they discover each other's deepest secrets, and Temperance reveals the passion hidden beneath her puritanical dress. Readers will enjoy the unusual pairing of an aristocratic man and a poor but educated widow, enhanced by earthy, richly detailed characterizations and deft historical touches.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

It is an offer Temperance Dews can’t afford to turn down. Ever since they lost their last patron, Temperance and her brother Winter have struggled to keep open the foundling home their family runs. So when Lazarus Huntington, Lord Caire, arrives one evening with a proposition, Temperance finds herself inviting the notorious nobleman in for tea rather than showing him the door. Lazarus needs to find someone in St. Giles, and he believes Temperance can help him because the foundling home is located in a crime-riddled London neighborhood, and she knows nearly everyone. In exchange, Lazarus will give her the temporary funds she needs, and introduce her to the wealthiest members of society. It was a simple business transaction, but Temperance and Lazarus quickly find themselves distracted by his and her new “partner.” With a dash of sharp wit; a rare literary flair for creating complex, compelling characters; and lively writing that packs a powerful emotional punch, Hoyt delivers the first sensually charged, danger-infused installment in a new Georgian-set series. --John Charles

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 392 pages
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing; 1 edition (August 1, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 044655894X
• ISBN-13: 978-0446558945
• Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 1.2 x 6.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (107 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #85,667 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Elizabeth Hoyt is the New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestselling author of historical romance, including reader favorite, The Raven Prince.

Elizabeth was born in New Orleans but grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota. She has a BA in anthropology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Elizabeth married relatively young and produced two children who kept her busy until her mid-thirties. At about this time, when her youngest was entering Kindergarten, Elizabeth's mother hinted that perhaps Elizabeth should get a Real Job.

Sadly, Elizabeth was so delusional she thought writing a romance novel might qualify as a Real Job.

But! Five years later, to everyone's surprise, she actually sold that romance novel (The Raven Prince) and began a rather successful career as a Romance Novelist. This was most fortunate since Elizabeth is singularly unqualified to do anything else but Make Up Stories.

Since then Elizabeth has written eleven books to critical acclaim: The Prince Trilogy (The Raven Prince, The Leopard Prince, and The Serpent Prince); the Legend of the Four Soldiers series (To Taste Temptation, To Seduce a Sinner, To Beguile a Beast, and To Desire a Devil); and the Maiden Lane series (Wicked Intentions, Notorious Pleasures, and the upcoming Scandalous Desires.) All of Elizabeth's books are set in eighteenth century England and all feature a fairy tale story that serves as a foil to the main story.

Elizabeth's books have finaled four times in Romance Writers of America's prestigious RITA award contest, have won two Romantic Times Reviewer's Choice Awards, and were nominated for a third. All of her books have received Top Pick reviews from Romantic Times BookReviews magazine. Wicked Intentions, Notorious Pleasures and Scandalous Desires received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly. Four of her books were voted into All About Romance's (AAR's) Top 100 Romances of All Time list and six were Desert Isle Keepers at AAR. Elizabeth's books have been translated into thirteen languages.

Elizabeth lives in central Illinois with a bevy of untrained canines and a garden in constant need of weeding. Please visit her website, ElizabethHoyt.com, for contests, book excerpts, news, and Sidetracked Research Articles.

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

(What's this?)

#50 in Books > Romance > Historical

#66 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Romance > Historical Romance

#50 in Books > Romance > Historical

#66 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Romance > Historical Romance

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

75 of 80 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting premise, with puzzling execution. July 31, 2010

By Old Latin teacher TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Mass Market Paperback

I respect the majority opinion so far that this is a 5-star book, so please don't hate me when I say that I'm not so fond of it. Now, Elizabeth Hoyt books, in general, I do like, especially her first, THE RAVEN PRINCE, which ranks up there in my list of favorite HRs.

WICKED INTENTIONS has all the ingredients that usually work for me in a paperback romance. Relatively tormented hero, heroine with a secret in her past, a mystery to solve, interesting secondary characters from all walks of life, hot romantic interludes, moments of suspense, moments of tenderness, the necessary HEA. But I found myself not appreciating the H and h much. The hero, Lazarus Huntington, Lord Caire, has, we are to understand, shocking sexual proclivities and a tormented past which leaves him as an adult with a revulsion to human touch and an inability to form emotional attachments. This dislike for touch is also, I assume, what is responsible for his preferences during sex. The problem for me is I read the whole book and then rechecked it after reading and still couldn't find much of a reason for it. I was expecting sexual abuse as a child or some other devastating trauma such as the hero was subjected to in Anna Campbell's CAPTIVE OF SIN, but could find no real reason for his 'touch' problem, only for his emotional attachment issues. In addition, this problem with touch was a bit inconsistent and particular: I can touch you/You can't touch me/Sometimes it's OK, sometimes not.

Heroine Temperance (and the rest of the Makepeace family) also puzzled me. The family has a brewery (not financially sound at this time) run by an older brother and also a charitable home for orphans which Temperance and her brother Winter are in charge of.... The family exudes the piousness of Quakers, especially Temperance and Winter. So what's with the brewery in the family background? I believe Temperance denies being a Quaker but they behave in a very pious manner, with the reading of Psalms and prayers and good works and their whole way of being is inconsistent with a family that has been involved in the production of alcoholic beverages.

Next we have the puzzle of the deal between Temperance and Caire. She is familiar with the disreputable St. Giles neighborhood because her Foundling Home is located there. Caire needs a guide to the area as he searches for the murderer of his lover of 3 years. So she agrees to be his guide if in return he will escort her to ton engagements so that she can find a patron/sponsor for the Foundling Home, which is badly in need of funds. This sounds good on paper but in execution these two as a duo are extremely ineffectual and inefficient. Their outings together (whether to the slums or to the upper-class gatherings) serve to build up a sexual relationship but lead to little success in finding either murderers or patrons. Caire did his most productive search on his own and Temperance only found potential patrons through a plan she and Godric St. John, Caire's friend, come up with, without Caire's knowledge.

Speaking of Godric St. John reminds me that this book is full of secondary characters, some of whom are integral to the story, but some who are very incidental and seem to be there only to prepare us for future books. All are interesting, fortunately, especially those from the slums. And the ending of the book leaves us wanting to know more about poor Silence, Temperance's sister, but it appears that Lady Hero Batten will be the heroine of the next book. I hope we find out more about Silence's problems in that book, unless Ms Hoyt plans for Silence to have a book of her own.

I'm sorry to have been nitpicking in this review. I did like the book enough to continue reading future books in the series, but not well enough to give it a higher rating. Read more ›

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars It was a dark and stormy . . . romance novel August 9, 2010

By Ann Elliot VINE™ VOICE

Format:Mass Market Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Most of us read romance novels to work through difficulties along with the main characters and to enjoy the euphoria they feel when they find happiness, love, and/or financial security. Those happy endings are all too rare in the real world, where the "bad guys" often win in our daily lives. Elizabeth Hoyt is incapable of writing a bad novel, but this one is unrelentingly dark and cheerless. Hoyt's quirky, amusing secondary characters are missing. Instead, readers are presented with a seriously ill infant, a maniacal dwarf, and an oppressive atmosphere both in the slums of St. Giles and in ballrooms--not to mention the prostitute-gutting and entrail dripping parts of the story.

The book seems to lack focus. This is the first of a series, so perhaps some unresolved issues and extraneous characters are to be expected. However, Hoyt handled the transition from novel to novel so deftly in her other two series that this one seems heavy-handed. Readers are left with the Ghost of St. Giles popping in and out--although clues are given to his identity--poor Silence devastated over the emotional and perhaps permanent physical absence of her husband, and Godric enduring the relentlessly declining health of his beloved wife.

The hero and heroine agree to a mutual assistance pact. He asks her to be his guide as he looks for a murderer in the backstreets of St. Giles. She asks him to introduce her to society in her quest to find a patron for her family's foundling home. Very quickly, he realizes that he is putting her in life-threatening danger--something he finds unacceptable and unnecessary, although he continues to put her in harm's way. She has her greatest patron-hunting success when she bypasses Lord Caire and seeks help from his best friend.... Somewhere in there, the plot seems to get a little blurry.

I have ALL of Elizabeth Hoyt's books in my "keeper" file. Fairly or unfairly, I'm comparing her with herself. If there were half stars, I'd give this book 3.5. If some of that constant mist of St. Giles were blown away and the lens through which readers see the story were brought into sharper focus, this would be a better book. Read more ›

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars To my surprise, it ended up being one of my favorite romances May 1, 2011

By J. P. VINE™ VOICE

Format:Mass Market Paperback

I have never before read an Elizabeth Hoyt book and that was mostly because after reading reviews about her books, I got the sense they were probably a little too wild with not enough actual story/substance for me. I am so glad I decided to finally test my theory and that I started with this one - I checked it out of the library but am definitely buying my own copy, because I know this will be a reread many, *many* times over! It took me completely off guard, but I absolutely fell in love with this book and its leading characters.

SUMMARY:
Temperance Dews runs an orphan/foundling home in St. Giles. It was first started by her father and she and one of her brothers, Winter, are now in charge. Due to the sudden death of the home's previous patron, they are now in dire financial straits and have to find some way of paying the rent, the other bills they owe, and supporting the children in their care.

Along comes Lazarus Huntington, Lord Caire with a deal that she can't refuse. He is in search of the murderer who viciously killed his mistress a few months ago, however is not familiar with St. Giles and needs a guide of sorts to help him navigate the area and encourage people to speak with him. Caire offers Temperance a bargain: she will serve as his guide in the evenings and he will help her find a new patron to support the home, providing some funds to make do in the meanwhile.

Caire is a bad, *bad* boy, which everyone appears to know except Temperance. She eventually discovers that he is so well (and scandalously) known because of certain "sexual proclivities" (let me say that although I was a little apprehensive when I read this in other people's reviews, it's really not that bad - he's just *by no means* Mr. Vanilla).... Temperance has her own desires that she is always struggling with, as she has basically convinced herself that feeling sexual desire is sinful, and so is in many ways intrigued to learn more. She is also curious when she discovers that this man who is apparently so sensual and depraved also has an aversion to anyone touching him.

As Temperance and Lazarus work their way through St. Giles trying to find the now-multiple murderer, their own relationship develops, both emotionally and physically. Each has secrets that they begin to reveal to one another, and as they do, these two seemingly opposite people learn that they are really not very different from one another.

THE MAIN CHARACTERS AND ROMANCE:
Oh lord, Elizabeth Hoyt *sure* knows how to write dark, sensual, and complex characters, as well as very sizzling scenes! I like great chemistry as much as the next person, but I am one of those romance readers who does not enjoy a basically lust-based romance, or erotica dressed up as romance. While that was my fear here, it turned out to be unsubstantiated: Hoyt is definitely a descriptive and "daring" (for some) writer, but I found that the characters and plot completely pulled their weight and were just as / more important to the story.

Lazarus is a bad boy whom I was a little confounded by at first, but could not help but begin to care for. You feel tenderness towards this man who is so obviously lonely and in many ways tragic; not only does he have an aversion to being touched (he has to be the initiator and can touch others, but doesn't like others touching him, in case you were wondering), but he also is unbelievably numb to most any and all emotions. So many times you read his exchanges with Temperance and you can see exactly what he's doing: trying to test her and push her away but also hoping she won't take the bait and will actually draw nearer. His story is revealed piece by piece and frankly there are still some parts left unclear (at least for me) at the end. I thought the addition of his friend St. John was great and in many ways necessary, for it gives us hints from the beginning that Caire is not as simply explained as his reputation would have us believe and provides us a whole new dimension.

The juxtaposition of him and Temperance is really well done, because despite the fact that yes she has desires like every human being - and engages in them with Caire - the truth is that she still is a proper, decent, emotion-filled person who is very much in stark contrast - at least in the beginning - to Caire. I thought she was a wonderful heroine: strong and capable and smart, but also very vulnerable and *real*! Especially given the time, her struggle and misunderstandings about her own sexuality were well-done and very realistic. Many not having read the book might shrug it off and see it as just a ploy to lead into some hot romance scenes, but while I think a less skillful author might have been unable to stop it from slipping into that, Hoyt manages it masterfully, and in so doing makes the book and characters that much stronger and engaging.

BEST QUOTE:
So many to choose from, but here is one of my favs: "There's something about her," Caire said in a low voice. "She cares for everyone about her, yet neglects herself. I want to be the one who cares for her." (p194)

OTHER NOTES:
For once, the mystery of a romance book was actually really well done - surprise, surprise! It didn't overrun the main story and the development of the h&h's relationship, wasn't contrived and was definitely necessary to the plot, and was not completely outlandish, while still having a surprising ending. To find all that in a romance mystery subplot is very unusual, so hats off to Hoyt!

The secondary characters were superb, with each one being well-defined and adding to the overall story. I've already mentioned St. John, but Caire's mother, Nell (maidservant and assistant at the home), and Temperance's sister and three brothers - especially Winter - were all interesting, pulled their own weight, and were their own stand-alone person.

SOME CRITICISMS:
Silence, Temperance's sister, is the heroine of the third book and oh lord, everyone who has read this book knows what I mean when I say I cannot wait for her story with "Charming" Mickey O'Connor!! My only complaint is that her story is so engaging - and obviously so, since she's to have her own romance with him - that it almost felt like an interruption every time we were taken away from Temperance and Caire and are solely with Silence and her POV. There weren't many of these sections, but they were there and not only do I think they detracted from this book, but they are so integral to her story that if they're not also provided in Book 3, anyone who reads it as a stand-alone won't be able to get the full effect.

As others have said, I think that Caire's issues with being touched could have been explored more and were solved a little too easily at the end.

The very, very end was fine, but the second to last part right before it (when there's the reconciliation and love declarations, etc.) felt odd to me - several parts of the scene were a little too sappy and corny, feeling out of place, especially given the tone of the rest of the book.

My last complaint is what was up with all the Mary this and Joseph that?! Could they not be at all more original in the naming, and also maybe try to make the orphans feel like they're individuals?! The fact that the second name added to Mary/Joseph has to do with how they came to be there - Joseph Tinbox, Mary Found, etc. - just made it that much worse.

MAIDEN LANE SERIES:
Book 1 - Wicked Intentions, Temperance Dews and Lazarus Huntington, Lord Caire
Book 2 - Notorious Pleasures, Lady Hero Batten and Griffin Remmington, Lord Reading
Book 3 - Scandalous Desires, Silence Hollingbrook and "Charming" Mickey O'Connor (out Sep 22, 2011)

BOTTOM LINE:
Read it! Such a wonderful book - it took me completely off guard, but I adored it and cannot wait to read it again! Also cannot, cannot wait for Book 3!! Read more ›