Silk and Sea Lavender

A marriage to save her family. A gentleman who never asked to be a bargain. And a secret stitched in silk.

Clemency Quennell has spent her life being overlooked. Quiet, partly deaf, and certain she is the plain daughter, she notices the things other people miss-and expects very little for herself.

Then the wealthiest man in the neighbourhood offers to change her future.

If Clemency marries his son Aubrey, the mortgage threatening her family's salt marsh will be destroyed as a wedding gift. The parish might call it generosity. Her family knows what it means.

Someone has put a price on their daughter.

Aubrey Venables knows what it is to disappoint a demanding father. A shy botanist with a stammer, he is far more comfortable studying wildflowers than defending himself. He never expected anyone to read his paper on the sea lavenders of the Solent.

Clemency has.

Between awkward conversations and unexpected moments of understanding, an arrangement neither wants begins to hold the possibility of something both do. But how can Clemency trust a courtship conducted under the shadow of her family's debt?

Then she notices the embroidery on the Venables' pew cushion.

Each Sunday brings a different flower, a different number of knots, a different colour of silk. Someone is changing the border with deliberate care. And in her father's Customs district, those stitches may be carrying messages out to sea.

Drawn into a mystery hidden in plain sight, Clemency and Aubrey must find the courage to question the people who expect their obedience-and claim a future no one else has the right to arrange.

Silk and Sea Lavender is a tender, quietly witty Regency romance about two shy hearts, a secret code, and a family determined to protect its own. Set on the Isle of Wight during the mourning winter of 1817, Book Five of The Sea Lavender Saga can be enjoyed on its own.

A clean and wholesome romance with a gentle mystery, no explicit content, and a happy ending assured.