Potent Pleasures

### Eloisa James

One ruinous night at a masquerade ball should have stayed buried in the past—but fate has a wicked sense of humor.

Years ago, Charlotte Daicheston surrendered everything to a masked stranger whose touch rewrote every rule she thought she lived by. She never expected to see him again. She certainly never expected to *marry* him.

Now Alexander Foakes, the insufferably arrogant Earl of Sheffield, stands across every glittering ballroom Charlotte enters—her husband in name, her tormentor in practice. He's cold where he once burned hot. Dismissive where he once devoured. And infuriatingly, devastatingly, he has no idea she's the woman he held in the darkness all those years ago.

Charlotte knows the truth. And the secret is eating her alive.

Their drawing room exchanges crackle with the kind of hostility that can only come from two people who desperately want something they refuse to admit. Every barbed word is a dare. Every stolen glance is a confession neither will speak aloud. Alexander thinks he married a difficult woman. Charlotte thinks she married a man who lost himself somewhere between that stolen night and now.

They're both wrong about each other in the most magnificent, heartbreaking ways possible.

Some secrets don't