ASH & IRON

Audrey Chen deals in facts, dates, and the chemical composition of rust. She doesn't believe in ghosts.

Hired to catalog the historical society's decaying Gallows Ridge Library before it's demolished, she expects damp paper and crumbling mortar. She doesn't expect the heavy, dragging sound of iron chains coming from the locked, structurally dangerous stone archway.

Gideon Frederick Dorne was executed for treason in 1789, his neck locked in an iron collar, his body left to die on the wet limestone floor. Bound to his forty-foot boundary, his protective blacksmith's rage has been smoldering in the dark for over two centuries.

Audrey's touch acts like bellows to his dying embers, turning his cold shadow into a hot, heavy, physical force.

When Audrey uncovers a court record of an irrevocable 1789 trust deed that legally bars the library's demolition, the greedy director moves early to board up the building. Audrey has only three days to crawl into the collapsing rubble of the archway, find the original deed, and save the man who has marked her as his own.

Heat Rating: (Open Door / High Steam / Gritty Intimacy)