Part of Mackenzies & McBrides
First published 2013
Violet Bastien fills concert halls across England with her act as a celebrated spiritual medium. She cannot actually reach the dead, but she reads living people with uncanny precision. Daniel Mackenzie walks into one of her séances already certain she is a fake. He is right. What he does not expect is how quickly she sees through him in return, or how little that changes his desire to be near her. Daniel has the Mackenzie looks, the Mackenzie money, and a talent for engines and invention that sets him apart even in that family. Violet clocks him as intelligent and genuinely risky to everything she has built. She also notices that he is generous and thoroughly wicked in ways she cannot dismiss. When figures from Violet's past close in and threaten to expose her, she runs, takes a new name, and tries to vanish. Daniel refuses to let her disappear. He tracks her across the continent, driven by a pull he cannot reduce to logic. Violet is certain her history makes any respectable future impossible. What she has not yet tested is whether Daniel Mackenzie operates on respectability at all, or on something harder to argue with.
Genres: romance, historical-fiction, adult, adult-fiction, historical-romance
Vibes: clever, emotionally-complex, intimate, tension-filled, witty
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, fake-medium, forced-proximity, slow-burn
Setting: England, Scotland, Continental Europe
Period: 19th-century
384 pages · Mass Market Paperback · Berkley Sensation