I don't know what took me so long to get around to reading this book! I'm mentally kicking myself now!My first read by Elizabeth Hoyt, Wicked Intentions, totally took me by surprise and utterly exceeded my expectations. I really did enjoy it. Thank you my lovely friend, Monty Cupcake ☠ Queen of Bloodshed ☠ , for recommending this book to me.I’ve rarely found Historical Romance novel with such intensity like this one. The story itself was great, filled with heat, darkness, drama, and excitement.

What an exciting story! I loved Ms. Hoyt's Princes Trilogy, but for whatever reason kept putting off reading the Maiden Lane series til book 1 appeared on Netgalley...and now I'm hooked! I love this world she's created - at times harsh and shadowed by the stark contrasts of the haves and have nots - and the amazing characters who live there. I was kept guessing, right to the end, who the killer was in this tragic murder mystery. Great plot, complex people... and definitely not your typical 'tale...

Original Post: Wicked Intentions at FLYLēF (www.flylef.com) with 3.5 of 5I’M HAPPILY NURSING a book hangover.Wicked Intentions, by Elizabeth Hoyt, is a tempestuous love story with a generous measure of danger. Ms. Hoyt’s ability to fuse vastly amusing characters with sensuous and mature love scenes (BLUSHING), make this historical romance worthy of a sleepless night.Temperance Dews and Lazarus Huntington are irresistibly flawed. He can be a bit of a brute and she can be a bit of a martyr, ne...

Well That Was Yummy Good!I had no idea was walking into an erotic, slightly gory, good deeds type of book but I certainly did. Temperance Dews (widower) and her brother Winter Makepeace <---(his name is freaking Winter, my favorite time of the year!) run the Home for Unfortunate Infants and Foundling Children. They both took it over after their father died but now they are in dire straits as one of their benefactors died and didn't leave them any money in his will. Poor Winter is working himself...

Oh, a silver-haired hero? My oh my! As he joins my book boyfriend list, Caire only has a couple of competitors: Jem from Infernal Devices, and Rowan from the Throne of Glass series.So, we have the hottie, Caire, who is a rich tortured soul with "unusual tastes" in the bedroom. Familiar? Maybe, but Christian Grey was written AFTER this book, so you tell me who the copycat is.men... they just don't get it! Am I right?So, ye old Christian Grey has a mistress who was murdered and he wants to find he...

What a delicious read <3 And Lazarus with his silver hair *swooons*I think the book slump has been finally defeated!!!

4,5⭐why did I wait to read this author?!

I thoroughly enjoyed my reread, and I still loved this book as much as I loved it before!! Glad my tastes haven't changed all that much, and I am very eager to keep going on this series...Onto my reread of book two now!!!

4.5 STARSReally enjoyed this one! Don't have time for a full review right now. And it will be almost impossible to find characters to cast... silver hair and all that. I loved the hero, and the heroine both. And I'm anxious to get started on the next book it the series. A very sexy little historical indeed! Loved it.

I'll probably never win another book through Goodreads' First Reads again with this review. What an anachronistic, ungrammatical, unfinished book that was. The book opens with the widow Temperance Dews wending her way through the dank and dangerous streets of St. Giles, clutching a loaded pistol. She’s on her way back to the foundling home she runs with her younger brother, returning with her maidservant and an infant they pried from the arms of a dead young mother. Along the way, she overhears

5 stars – Historical RomanceWow! This is the first book I’ve read by popular author Elizabeth Hoyt, and I certainly understand now why she’s so highly rated. Wicked Intentions, the first book in her new Maiden Lane series, is a dark, gritty, eerie, emotional, unique, and erotic murder mystery and romance with a bold, honest social commentary of class differences, poverty, and the rough, violent world of St. Giles in London. The main characters, widowed child foundling home caregiver Temperance D...

Holy He!!, what took me so longFirst of all, this book is not for the weak in the knees when it comes to, uh, shall we say, knocking boots in its various forms. This book, well, it goes where you do NOT expect it to go. There, enough about that. Ok, one more thing, HOT. Done. Apparently, my catnip involves seriously tortured heroes. I never thought it did. In fact, most of em get on my last nerve. I may need to further examine this, but heroes like those created and tortured by the likes of Kerr...

I love broken heroes they do something to me. They can be the biggest jerks even and I’ll accept it because I just what them to be fixed. Lord Caire is pretty broken and so I loved him immediately. Temperance was pretty likeable and while I mis-guessed what her devastating secret was but I got who she was and why it was such a huge part of her identity.Temperance runs a home for orphaned or unwanted children and she has helped extensively with it since the death of her husband. It is in dire str...

Once more I'm on the fence with this one since everyone else seems to love it. For me, it was a book that had a lot of potential but never quite reached to it. It reminded me a lot of The Serpent Prince, another book by Hoyt that most people besides me loved, in that it is very dark and intense, even for Hoyt's standards, and in the way it tried to be angsty and introduce some damaged heroes but never quite convinced me of it. In fact for me it was worse than TSP, in that I never came to care ab...

Oh Lazarus. You can whisper naughty things in my ear any day. He's just my type of man - he has trouble with emotions and can't stand being touched! Just what I look for. At first glance he comes across as a little bit, okay, a lot, sociopathic. But unlike sociopaths, he actually has emotions, he's just never had any reason to let his guard down enough to share them with anyone, until Temperance.Urgh, Temperance. I really could have done without her slut shaming herself the entire way through th...

Well this was quite a hot little number! Enjoyed it. 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 . . . "I'd walk through fire for you." Just pretend...

“you draw me. Because you are kind but not soft. Because when you touch me, the pain is bittersweet.Because you cradle a desperate secret to your bosom, like a viper in your arms, and don’t let go of it even as it gnaws upon your very flesh. I want to pry that viper from your arms. To suckle upon your torn and bloody flesh. To take your pain within myself and make it mine.” I put off starting this series for so long that I almost forgot about it. Until this afternoon when I decided to give th

FULL REVIEW NOW POSTEDLazarus said to Temperance:Because you are kind but not soft. Because when you touch me, the pain is bittersweet. Because you cradle a desperate secret to your bosom, like a viper in your arms, and don't let go of it even as it gnaws upon your very flesh. I want to pry that viper from your arms. To suckle upon your torn and bloody flesh. To take your pain within myself and make it mine."4.5 stars.LONDON 1737Widow Temperance Dews is rather surprised to find a visitor at her

To my surprise, it ended up being one of my favorite romances (5 stars)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!

The book that started it all. "I rarely feel anything. But like the legless man, I'm unaccountably fascinated by those who can dance." Our hero Lazarus started off the darkly mysterious, darkly intriguing, and darkly sexy man often found in romance. What distances him and makes him better than a lot was his layered personality of cool waters run deep and vulnerable and passionate soul. He was perfectly matched with our heroine Temperance with her mixture of kind spirit and desirous heart. As L...