Your Wicked Heart is a lovely novella in which Meredith Duran, in under a hundred pages, creates and fleshes out her two protagonists and charts the development of their relationship from their initial hostility through precarious friendship and mistrust to attraction, desire and eventually, love.

For a novella, there’s a lot going on, and while I appreciate that perhaps it doesn’t feel as ‘thorough’ as Duran’s full-length novels, I can accept that because she made me care about Ripton and Amanda and want to know what happened next.

Amanda is a ‘nobody’, a secretary who has had to make her own way in the world for much of her life, but who yearns to do more with her life. She is intelligent and intuitive, and despite her precarious situation in life, nonetheless has a sunny and positive outlook which causes Ripton to realise that his view on life has become rather jaded due to his heavy responsibilities. Ripton was orphaned at an early age and brought up by his despotic uncle and his aunt; assuming his viscountcy at nineteen, he also assumed the responsibility for what we are told is a large family of self-indulgent and rather hard-to-manage cousins (whose stories will presumably be told in the series to which this is the prequel). As a result, he comes across as rather stern and forbidding; accustomed to getting his own way by whatever means necessary, he is ready to believe the worst of Amanda in order to brush her quickly aside so he can resume his search for his cousin.

The description of Amanda as rather a china-doll of a heroine -wide blue eyes, blond ringlets – you know the sort of thing, might normally have put me off (I tend to prefer the less perfect types), but that didn’t happen here. She is so unaffected and caring that it was easy to like her, despite her occasional bouts of naïveté.

And Ripton is just gorgeous. Handsome, of course, but so bound up with the management of his estates and family that he has become rather irascible and has forgotten to look for the beauty in life. He’s charming in that way that indicates he’s not really aware of just how charming he is, but despite his looks and wealth, he’s lonely and it takes spending time with someone as enthusiastic and vivacious as Amanda for him to realise it.

I loved Your Wicked Heart. The characters drew me in, the writing is excellent and the emotion just jumps off the page.