The Lady in the Next Room — Paperback
$21.99
📖 Paperback Edition — A widow with a locked drawer. A runaway with a borrowed name. 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno • Sapphic Regency Romance • Landlady/Lodger • Thin Walls • Secret Writer • Hidden Identity. 6 × 9 paperback. For readers 18+.
Description
📖 Paperback Edition — A widow with a locked drawer. A runaway with a borrowed name. And a door with two bolts between them.
Bath, 1818. Frances Bellamy has nine pounds in a tin box, seventeen due at Christmas, two empty rooms, a publisher who will not pay her, and a locked drawer of filthy pages she writes in bed and has never shown a living soul. Every woman in them is taken by surprise. Nobody on the page is ever asked.
Then at nine o’clock on a wet October night, a stranger knocks: dark blond hair plastered by the rain, a hem wet to the knee, a pawnshop wedding ring a size too large, and a name, Mrs. Grey, that will not bear leaning on. Arabella Wren has sold her mother’s pearls a dozen at a time to escape a marriage arranged to pay her cousin’s debts. All she wants is a door that locks.
The room Frances lets her has two. The door between their bedrooms opens only when both bolts are drawn. Either woman may shut the other out. Neither can let herself in.
But the walls of No. 6 Quiet Street are thin. Arabella can hear a pen running at two in the morning. Frances can hear the ropes of a bed. And when the lodger she has hired to copy her novel finds a leaf of the drawer tucked inside volume two, a stranger with rain in her hair, kneeling, she knows exactly whose hem was wet to the knee.
One bolt is already drawn. The other is Frances’s affair.
🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno • Sapphic Regency Romance by Evelyn Ashcombe
Tropes: Landlady/Lodger • Forced Proximity • Thin Walls • Strangers to Lovers • Secret Writer • Runaway Gentlewoman • Hidden Identity • Mutual Pining • Touch Starved • Sexual Awakening • Dirty Talk • Class Difference • Found Family
Paperback details: 6 × 9 in • cream paper • matte cover. Includes a link to the exclusive bonus chapter.
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes, including oral sex, manual sex, mutual masturbation through a closed door, overheard sex, sex in a kitchen hip bath, light bondage with a velvet ribbon, sex against a door and in a library back room, a leather dildo, and a strap-on tied with stay-laces; all on-page sex is consensual, with “colder” honoured on the page), references to a joyless past marriage with dutiful marital sex (off-page), family pressure toward an arranged marriage to settle a debt, blackmail with a private manuscript, financial precarity and the threatened loss of a livelihood, the burning of a manuscript, a painful separation, period attitudes toward women, class and same-sex love, and strong language. No sexual violence, no dub-con, no cheating. Intended for readers 18+.
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