Nightshade

Cordelia Sinclair is a book-restorer with ink-stained hands and no family left, which is exactly why the estate hired her cheap and asked no questions. One winter shut inside Elsmere Hall, cataloguing the library of a house the whole fen crosses itself to name, and she will have earned enough to disappear somewhere warm and forget the cold ever touched her.

Lucien Ravenscar, the Lord of Elsmere, is grave and pale and a great deal older than he looks, and every soul in the village swears he is the monster draining its dead. He warns her off the first night. Then he does the one thing she does not expect from a monster. He tells her he cannot cross her threshold, or take a single drop of her blood, unless she says the word first, and that he will let it go the moment she takes it back.

It turns out the oldest law of his kind is consent, and force is a poison that rots the one who uses it. Which means the ragged, greedy killings the fen lays at his door were never his at all. Cordelia has read enough forged papers to know a lie when the ink sits wrong, and the true monster has been wearing a saint’s face for five hundred years, holding up an old book as proof of his goodness while he buries the evidence in plain sight.

Nightshade is a standalone gothic vampire romance with a guaranteed happily-ever-after. For adult readers.