An Ungovernable Summer: A Georgian Enemies-to-Lovers Romance

Six weeks pretending to be friends. Forty witnesses. And a truth worth a hanging. Every June, Sir Lucius Verney fills Harrowden Abbey with forty artists, scholars, aristocrats and social disasters, seats them all at one table, and asks nobody their business. It is the invitation of the season. It is also, though Sir Lucius has never said so aloud, the one house in England where certain men can breathe. Robert Ashworth built that. Sixteen summers of guest lists, chamber allocations, and a household trained never to remark - and in sixteen summers he has never once allowed himself to use it. He has no capital, no land, and no profession that is not another man's goodwill. Discretion is not his virtue. It is his entire estate. Captain Gideon Hale arrives on half pay with a swamp story he is tired of telling, prize money he cannot bring himself to spend, and no notion what to do with the rest of his life. He is given the hottest room in Oxfordshire, concludes the steward did it deliberately, and sets about being a nuisance until somebody explains why. "You have put me in the hottest room." "I have put you in the remaining room." They loathe each other for four days. On the fifth night the heat drives half the house out of its bedchambers, Gideon opens the wrong door at two in the morning, and by dawn a footman has seen enough to hang them both. After that, their only defence is to be seen constantly together and entirely at ease, in front of forty people who notice everything. Six weeks of public friendship, performed for an audience, with the county watching and the assizes two days' ride away. It would be considerably easier if either of them could go on believing it was a performance - and considerably safer if nobody else in the house had worked out what a silence is worth. An Ungovernable Summer is a steamy, witty, open-door M/M historical romance set in Georgian England. - Enemies to lovers, and neither of them concedes gracefully - Forced proximity in a full house with nowhere to go - He falls first, and knows exactly how stupid it is - A dangerous secret, and one witness who could end them - Competence as armour, and the man determined to get past it - Class difference, and no polite way around it - Open-door heat and a hard-won happy ending Book One of Summers at Harrowden Abbey. Each book is a complete standalone romance between two men, with its own happy ending and no cliffhanger. One house in Oxfordshire, one summer a year, a new pair every June. Contains explicit sexual content between adult men, period-accurate legal peril, and the threat of exposure. Full content notes appear in the front of the book.