Everything about this book is so freaking beautiful. There are only a handful of authors where I stop mid-scene and sit in awe bc the prose is so gorgeous, and Hayworth is one of them for me now. I was highlighting every other page. In a moment where we’re being told to embrace AI for everything including art, this is exactly the kind of writing that proves why that’s such a loss. You cannot fake this. The emotional specificity, the single image description (“a felled oak, molasses-colored hair, brick and mortar beliefs”) is so deeply, unmistakably human.

Sophie’s grief is what wrecked me. It’s in her bones, in every social call she trudges through, in how she prepares for a ball like a “felled, rotting oak.” Hayworth doesn’t let her move past the grief so she can fall in love. The grief stays, and Rafe meets her inside it. That’s what I loved so much about how fit with her. He sees the cracks in her armor immediately and he doesn’t try to fix her, he just gives her the space and stays with her in that grief.
Rafe is doing his own challenging work alongside her. His relationship with his father is brutal, and his arc, from a lifetime of being controlled to finding his spine, is as much the heart of this book as the romance. Their slow build of glances and almost-touches and a first kiss had me holding my breath while racing my heart. The yearning yanked on my heart for pages at a time. I swear I haven’t felt like this in a book in a while.

I will be stalking everything Hayworth writes from here on out. Please let Lord Hansbury have a book!

Thank you to NetGalley and Larkmoor Press for the ARC. All thoughts and opinions are my own.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​