Breaking Lily In

The taxi driver took one look at the track and refused to drive up it.

Lily Hawthorne paid him, hauled her army surplus kitbag onto her shoulder, and started walking. Up the rutted limestone track. Past the dry stone walls and the cropped sheep pasture. Into the Yorkshire Dales, into a summer she hasn't planned for, into a yard called Stonebeck Farm and a life she doesn't yet have words for.

Lily is nineteen. A Devon farmer's daughter. Blonde, freckled, strong from a childhood of mucking out and lifting feed sacks. She has come north for a summer apprenticeship she found on a notice board. She knows horses better than she knows herself. She knows almost nothing about anything else.

Then she stands at the rail of the outdoor school and watches a woman ride a chestnut mare through a half-pass, and the world tilts on its axis.

Captain Eleanor Bishop. Forty-something. Cream breeches, long brown boots, a low plait threaded with grey at the temples. The kind of hands that say everything to a horse with the smallest closing of a finger. The kind of voice that says good girl in lessons and means it differently, every time, until Lily's body learns the difference before her mind catches up.

A dressage whip across the back of a thigh. The first time. Sharp, bright, precise. And the heat that sinks through the muscle and lands somewhere lower, warmer, somewhere Lily has no map for yet.

A flask of black coffee left on a shelf at dawn. A note in fountain pen ink. A handprint between the shoulder blades, at the withers, the same place a horse is touched to be told you're safe, you're mine.

A boot room full of polished implements. A bit on a small brass hook, sized for a human mouth. A four-poster bed with white linen sheets that Lily may, eventually, depending, earn the right to sleep in.

This is a slow-burn sapphic dominance romance set in a working yard in high summer. For readers who love a calm, exacting older woman who trains the women she chooses with the same patience she trains her horses. Who love a young woman who didn't know what she was until someone with steady hands and a low voice showed her. Who love the smell of saddle soap and the snap of a crop and the word Hawthorne spoken across a tack room at dusk.