I hate everything about her. She despises me even more. So why does she plague my every waking thought?Once trapped into marriage with a woman he loathed, Fitzwilliam Darcy is free at last — and resolved that his next wife, should he ever stoop to take one, will be everything the first was not. So much for resolve. A brief stay in Hertfordshire delivers him straight into his worst nightmare: a woman who bears his dead wife’s very name, wears a ghost of her face, and proves, to his considerable fury, impossible to ignore.
Torn between the woman he is certain he wants and the one he cannot reason himself out of, Darcy watches his hard-won composure come apart at the seams. Is Elizabeth Bennet merely his ruin in a prettier disguise — as nefarious as the wife he buried? Or is the last woman in the world his only hope of happiness?
Told entirely from inside the head of the most gloriously unreliable narrator in Hertfordshire — a cynical, widowed Darcy who has sworn off the one woman in England unlucky enough to share the name of the wife he buried, and who is certain he is right about everything and wrong about nearly all of it — Nefarious is a darkly hilarious, slow-burn enemies-to-lovers variation where the sparring is the courtship and the wit cuts both ways. Perfect for readers who love a tortured hero dragged back toward his own honour, a battle of equals neither will concede, a hero who falls first and fights it every step of the way, and a hard-won happily ever after — by way of a duel, a false murder charge, a gaol cell, and a trial with everything on the line.
