His clockwork canary

Simon Darcy is an ambitious engineer with a family to redeem. His monorail project failed and left the Darcys destitute, and Queen Victoria has now opened a competition to recover lost inventions of historical significance. Winning would restore the family's name.

Simon aims higher than anyone else. He wants the banned time-travel device that brought scientists, engineers and artists from the twentieth century into the past and permanently altered the world. The Mod technology was supposedly destroyed, yet Simon is certain he can rebuild it.

His audacious plan catches the eye of Willie G., the Clockwork Canary, a sensationalist reporter in London. Simon soon learns that Willie is a male persona adopted by Wilhemina Goodenough, the love of his youth, who jilted him and left him bitter.

He distrusts her reasons for following him, but her charm works on him anyway. The attraction between them flares again. Wilhemina holds secrets that could help Simon's future, if he can set their shared past aside.

This is a steampunk romance with an alternate-history Victorian setting, a rivals-and-second-chances dynamic, and an inventor's contest driving the plot.