Kate Taylor has found everything she thought she wanted in Spindle Cove — a home, a community of women who accept her exactly as she is, and a steady position teaching music to the seaside hamlet's young ladies. What she has never had is the one thing she still longs for: someone to truly love her.
Then a carriage of aristocratic strangers rolls into the Sussex village claiming Kate may be their long-lost, illegitimately-born cousin — and Corporal Samuel Thorne, the militia's stern and taciturn commander, abruptly declares himself her fiancé to shield her from them. It is a lie meant to buy Kate time. But Thorne has been quietly watching over her for years, ever since he pulled her from danger as a girl, and the closer their pretend engagement brings them, the harder it becomes for either to remember it isn't real.
Set against the Napoleonic-era threat gathering along England's coast in the summer of 1814, A Lady by Midnight is the third novel in Tessa Dare's beloved Spindle Cove series — a story about the families we're given, the ones we choose, and the courage it takes to believe we deserve to be loved.
