NAUGHTY BY NATURE - Barbara Pierce
St. Martin's Paperbacks
ISBN: 0-312-94796-8
December 2007
Historical Romance

Cheshire and London, England, 1810

A young traveling player with good looks and practiced charm lured Patience Farnaly into running away with him. In this, he was aided and abetted by the baronet's fourteen-year-old daughter's own folly. Patience joined the troupe of players, but life was not as glamorous as she had expected, nor was Julian Phoenix a gentle lover...but she couldn't go home again. Patience was sixteen when she killed Julian Phoenix. It wasn't murder; an accident occurred as Patience resisted being drugged and forced to whore for Julian. Patience, using another last name, spent the next two years managing the remainder of the troupe -- who thought that Julian had abandoned them -- as they toured the countryside. Now eighteen, Patience has arranged for them to entertain a party at a lord's country estate. Her life is about to enter another new phase.

Fowler Knowden, the Earl of Ramscar makes one fourth of a group of fast friends known as les sauvages nobles. Noble they are, but not as savage as their reputations, though Ram is eager to get back to town and all the pleasures it offers a single man of fortune and title. But this year, he vows not to let his sister stay behind once more. Lady Meredith will soon be four and twenty; it's time for her to join Society. For the last eleven years, since the fire that took her mother and twin sister, Meredith has stayed in seclusion in the country. Ram cannot convince her that she is beautiful in spite of her scars, that others will soon see only her loveliness. She refuses to attend the party at a neighboring house, so Ram attends alone.

Ram is very much taken with a young lady he meets at Lord and Lady Powning's gathering. It's as much her lively spirit of independence as her blond beauty. When he learns she's one of the entertainers, he conceives an idea. Patience becomes Lady Meredith's paid companion, and Ram was right, she's able to help convince his sister to spend the Season in Town.

All dressed to the nines and under the sponsorship of a dowager duchess -- mother of another noble savage -- the two young ladies are introduced to Society. Living in the same house, Patience and Ram, two passionate individuals, must fight temptation at every turn. I'll leave you to guess how well they succeed and how Patience's past turns up to haunt them all.

NAUGHTY BY NATURE is at once a fun tale and a sensuous one, with poignancy added to the mix. Ram is a good man, a worthy hero, and Patience is a highly sympathetic combination of strength and vulnerability, knowingness and innocence. And we can't leave out Meredith; you'll fall for her in a minute.

NAUGHTY BY NATURE is connected to SINFUL BETWEEN THE SHEETS and WICKED UNDER THE COVERS that tell the stories of the Dowager Duchess of Solitea's son, the duke, and daughter. Ram's succumbing to love leaves just two of the four of les sauvages nobles left unattached. Which one is next?

Jane Bowers