Hannah's Awakening

Nineteen-year-old Hannah Carter is drowning. Drowning in a white-walled dorm room that smells of nothing. Drowning in her mother's gentle, suffocating phone calls. Drowning in the quiet, polite girl everyone keeps telling her to be.

So when her tutor sets a brief about working with her hands, Hannah climbs onto a bus, rides it out into the Derbyshire dark, and pushes open the door of a converted watermill on a muddy lane.

That's where she meets Vivienne Ashford.

Bare feet on cold stone. A leather apron worn soft from years of use. Hair pinned up with a pencil. Hands that know exactly what they're doing, and grey eyes that look at Hannah like she's a piece of clay that hasn't decided yet what it wants to become.

Vivienne is everything Hannah's small life has never let her imagine. Older. Composed. Patient in a way that makes Hannah's breath catch in places it shouldn't. And from the moment Vivienne's clay-dusted hand closes over Hannah's on the wheel, Hannah's body starts answering questions her mind has never dared to ask.

A thumb on her lip. The word sweetheart, murmured low and close. A finger pressed firmly between her shoulder blades and the way her whole body straightens for it without being told. Hannah doesn't have a name for what she's feeling. She only knows that on Tuesday evenings, in a warm room that smells of cedar and woodsmoke, she becomes someone she's never been brave enough to be before.

This is a story about discovering hunger you didn't know you had. About a quiet girl who's been told her whole life to be good, finding out there's a whole other meaning of the word good, spoken by a woman who knows exactly how to use it. It's about rope and clay and the slow, deliberate undoing of every careful boundary Hannah has ever built around herself. It's about kneeling. About being kept. About a porcelain collar with a single thread of gold.

It's about what happens when an older woman with calloused hands and infinite patience decides to take a frightened girl apart, slowly, piece by piece, and see what she's really made of.

For readers who love their sapphic romance slow-burning and devastating. Who want a confident, masterful older woman and a desperate young thing learning the shape of her own surrender. Who know that the hottest scenes aren't always the loudest, that a single word whispered at the right moment can hit harder than anything.

If you've ever wanted to be looked at the way Vivienne looks at Hannah, attentive, knowing, certain, this is your book.

Step inside the studio.

The door is open. The fire is lit.

She's been waiting for you.