The Portrait of Lady Ash — Paperback
$19.99
📖 Paperback Edition — She’s been painted shut for 159 years. 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno • FF Sapphic Gothic Romance • Trapped in a Painting • Conservator × Witch • Haunted House • Touch Starved. 6 × 9 paperback. For readers 18+.
Description
📖 Paperback Edition — She’s been painted shut for 159 years. The woman who cleans her is the first to ask permission.
Celeste Arden doesn’t believe in anything she can’t test. Fired by the woman she loved for refusing to sign a lie, the paintings conservator takes the only job left to her: six weeks on a tidal island, cleaning a filthy Victorian portrait before a private buyer collects it on the morning tide.
The commission comes with a dead restorer’s cardigan still hung on the stool, a cleaning recipe nobody should ever use, and a sitter whose painted hand drums on the marble when nobody’s looking.
Lady Vivienne Ash has been sealed inside her own portrait since 1867. She can’t feel. She can’t move. She can only speak when someone looks her in the face. Then Celeste’s first swab touches the hollow of her throat, and she feels every single stroke.
Every inch Celeste uncovers comes back to life. A throat. A pair of silver eyes. Hands that were painted over because they were used. A mouth painted small so it couldn’t say no. And every inch comes with a rule: Celeste tells her first, and waits for yes.
But the woman who painted Vivienne shut never stopped coming back for her. She has a buyer, a van, and a very good reason to want the conservator gone. And the tide is coming in.
🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno • FF Sapphic Gothic Romance by Maeve Hollow
Tropes: Conservator × Witch • Trapped in a Painting • Immortal × Mortal • Age Gap • Gothic • Haunted House • Island Forced Proximity • Tell Me First • Instruction Kink • Dream Sex • Scar Worship • Touch Starved • Standalone
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 masturbation under instruction, oral sex, face-sitting, light restraint and a strap-on), magical imprisonment, a former lover’s coercive control and manipulation, the death of a secondary character (in the past, by solvent asphyxiation), a character compelled to walk into the sea, burns, body horror (cracked paint, rapid aging and disintegration), references to a past controlling relationship and a career-ending firing, grief, and strong language. Intended for readers 18+.
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