The Teachers Pet

Fiona Plump is eighteen, the quietest girl in Year 13, and spends more time inside books than outside of them.

She has never been kissed. She has never been on a date. She lives with her mum in a small semi on a quiet street and keeps five blue diaries lined up on the shelf above her desk with the spines turned inward, because the thought of anyone seeing her handwriting makes her stomach clench. She has crushes she has never told a living soul about. She has a body she pulls her cardigan tight across every morning. She has a brain that runs rings around everyone in her class, and a voice that almost never uses it.

And then, on the first Monday of the autumn term, Miss Davies walks into Classroom 14.

Twenty-eight. Chestnut ponytail. A cream silk blouse with the top two buttons undone and a single pearl sitting in the hollow of her throat. New to the school. Warm with the class from the first minute, funny, clever, the kind of teacher who makes Shakespeare feel like gossip. She reaches Fiona's desk halfway down the register and asks her what she loves about English Literature, and Fiona, staring up into those hazel eyes with the blush already climbing her neck, hears herself answer in a voice she didn't know she had.

Beautifully put, Fiona.

And that is how it begins.

The Teacher's Pet is a slow, wicked, breathtakingly tender story about a shy, brilliant sixth-former and the new English teacher who sees her the way nobody has ever seen her before. About extra tutoring after school and a classroom with the blinds drawn. About a hand that rests a little too long on a knee. About the word sweetheart said softly at a desk, and then, later, said out loud in front of the whole class. About a girl who has spent eighteen years trying to make herself invisible finally meeting a woman who refuses to let her.

It is a first-time story. It is an age-gap story. It is a story about two locked doors, amber autumn light, and the particular devastation of being told, by exactly the right person, that you are a good girl.

Miss Davies has done this before.

Fiona has absolutely no idea what is about to happen to her.

A sapphic taboo romance. Warm, slow, wicked, and completely, ruinously good.