A Lady by Midnight

Kate Taylor has built a settled life in Spindle Cove, a Sussex seaside village. She has a home, friends among the women who live there, and a steady post teaching music to the young ladies. The one thing she has never had is someone who truly loves her.

Then a carriage of aristocrats arrives with a startling claim: Kate may be their long-lost cousin, born outside marriage. Corporal Samuel Thorne, the stern and taciturn commander of the local militia, abruptly announces that he is her fiancé. The lie is meant only to buy her time.

Thorne has watched over Kate quietly for years, since he pulled her out of danger when she was a girl. As the pretend engagement draws them close, it gets harder for both of them to remember it is false.

The novel is a historical romance set in the summer of 1814, with the threat of Napoleonic war gathering along England's coast. It is the third book in the Spindle Cove series.

The pairing is a reserved soldier and a woman who longs to be wanted, and the fake engagement drives the plot. Expect a warm, character-led story in which family, both given and chosen, matters as much as the courtship.