The Hour Between

Edinburgh, 1622. The harvest has failed, the closes are full of the hungry, and someone in the Luckenbooths is selling Mairi Thornfield’s grandmother.

Mairi has kept her gift small all her life. She can touch a thing and know the hour it last held strong feeling, and she has never said so aloud, because the last Thornfield woman who spoke what she read was burned for it. But a silver relic sold to a grieving widow carries, to the hour, the afternoon of that burning. The family amber, stolen twenty-four years ago, is being emptied into fakes, and the sale that will finish it falls on Lady Day.

To reach the dealer’s rooms she needs a respectable reason to be in the city. Simon Lorimer, an Augsburg-trained clockmaker sunk in debt to the same dealer, needs an eye that can tell new brass from old. So they promise, before witnesses, to marry at Whitsunday.

It is only a cover. He is lying to her. She has known since the day she touched his tools. And in Scotland, a promise followed by one honest night is a marriage, whether you meant it or not.

Fake betrothal, real marriage. Slow burn. A heroine who reads time and a hero who forges it.

The Hour Between is the second book of The Thornfield Inheritance, a saga following one family of gifted women across four centuries. It is a complete romance with a happy ending and can be read on its own.