To Burn

With its wealth of rapid-fire repartee and smoldering sex scenes, Claudia Dane's To Burn lives up to its title, spinning a red-hot, medieval-era romance between Wulfred, a vengeful Saxon conqueror intent on bending Rome and its people to his will, and Melania, Wulfred's proud and plucky Roman prisoner. As Wulfred and Melania engage in a delightful battle of wills he deems she should live and suffer as his slave, so she tries every method to kill herself and thwart him the romantic tension between the pair mounts, but their old enmities may be too great to overcome. An overwrought but seductive romance by one of the genre's fastest rising stars, Dane's newest (after The Marriage Bed) brims with beguiling characters and historical richness.