Pony

Delpha Beale has spent twelve years making herself indispensable-and leaving before anyone can decide she is not.

At twenty-nine, she accepts a governess position at Mansgrave Park, an isolated Derbyshire estate ruled by Jasper Middlemiss, the formidable Earl of Covingdon. His twelve-year-old ward has driven away four governesses in two years. One wing of the house has been sealed for nearly a decade. And the dead woman whose presence still lingers in its rooms bears an unsettling resemblance to Delpha herself.

Jasper sees through the careful composure that has protected Delpha since childhood. Behind closed doors, he draws her into a private world of discipline, confession, and chosen surrender-one that teaches her to inhabit her body without fear and speak desires she has spent a lifetime suppressing. But the more fully she gives herself to him, the clearer it becomes that Jasper can awaken the woman beneath the governess's grey dresses without offering that woman a future.

Then Orlando Bluit, the warm and irreverent Marquess of Forebrook, arrives at Mansgrave. Where Jasper offers secrecy, Orlando offers daylight. Where one man teaches Delpha how to surrender, the other asks what she wants-and waits for the answer.

As the locked rooms of Mansgrave surrender their secrets, Delpha discovers that the dead woman's history is bound to her own, and that a powerful figure from her childhood may threaten the boy she has come to love. To protect the fragile family forming around her, Delpha must confront the past that taught her to disappear-and decide whether she can be fully known without surrendering any part of the woman she has become.

One man awakened her. Another may be willing to stay. But first, Delpha must claim her life as her own.